A lot of economic and social situations can be described as contests in which agents need to distribute scare resources. Individual behavior plays an important role within these situations, while identity strongly impacts on behavior. This paper asks how group identity impacts the provision of a...

Individuals who share a common identity show persistently elevated contributions to public goods. Yet, so far the factors that actually trigger this welfare enhancement are not precisely understood. We investigate two channels: (1) subjects ́expectations on group members ́cooperativeness and...

Costly signalling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal’s cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signalling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average...