This paper experimentally investigates the role of beliefs, trust, and risk in shaping cooperative behavior. By applying incentivized elicitation methods to measure these concepts, we find that beliefs about others’ behavior and trust are positively associated with cooperation in a public...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

Evidence from an experiment investigating the "house money effect" in the context of a public goods game is reconsidered. Analysis is performed within the framework of the panel hurdle model, in which subjects are assumed to be one of two types: free-riders, and potential contributors. The...

Public goods are dealt with in two literatures that neglect each other. Mechanism design advises a social planner that expects individuals to misrepresent their valuations. Experiments study the provision of the good when preferences might be non-standard. We introduce the problem of the...

Social comparison feedback, i.e. informing people about the behavior of others, has been shown to influence prosocial behavior in many domains, including tax compliance and energy conservation. We argue that heterogeneity in people's (un)willingness to consult the corresponding information...

In this study, we estimate unadjusted and adjusted gender gap in time preference, risk attitudes, altruism, trust, trustworthiness, cooperation and competitiveness using data on 1088 high-school students from 53 classes. These data, collected by running incentivized experiments in Hungarian...

We delineate the various ways in which rights to environmental and other resources can be assigned to individuals or groups. We then examine models of individual and group interactions, drawing out their implications for the ways in which resources will be utilized and managed under various...

There is a potential free-rider problem when several siblings consider future provision of care for their elderly parents. Siblings can commit to not providing long- term support by living far away. If location decisions are made by birth order, older siblings may enjoy a first-mover advantage....

This research is inspired by in-kind donations that have the capacity to increase the marginal benefit (productivity) in provision of public goods, for example by providing critical infrastructure that increases the productivity of resources utilized by local public good providers. We provide...

Intergenerational altruism and contemporaneous cooperation are both important to the provision of long-lived public goods. Equilibrium climate protection may depend more sensitively on either of these considerations, depending on the type of policy rule one examines. This conclusion is based on...