We analyze linear, weakest-link and best-shot public goods games in which a distinguished team member, the team allocator, has property rights over the benefits from the public good and can distribute them among team members. These team allocator games are intended to capture natural asymmetries...

This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by its consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory...

In this paper we show that a simple model of fairness preferences explains major experimental regularities of common pool resource (CPR) experiments. The evidence indicates that in standard CPR games without communication and without sanctioning possibilities inefficient excess appropriation is...

We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with four competing strategies: cooperators, defectors, punishing cooperators, and punishing defectors. To explore the robustness of the cooperation-promoting effect of costly punishment, besides the usual strategy adoption...

We study the evolution of cooperation under the assumption that the collective benefits of group membership can only be harvested if the fraction of cooperators within the group, i.e., their critical mass, exceeds a threshold value. Considering structured populations, we show that a moderate...

We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games where, besides the classical strategies of cooperation (C) and defection (D), we consider punishing cooperators (PC) or punishing defectors (PD) as an additional strategy. Using a minimalist modeling approach, our goal is to...

Understanding whether the size of the interacting group has an effect on cooperative behavior has been a major topic of debate since the seminal works on cooperation in the 1960s. Half a century later, scholars have yet to reach a consensus, with some arguing that cooperation is harder in larger...

Theoretical models have had difficulties to account, at the same time, for the most important stylized facts observed in experiments of the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism. A recent approach tackling that gap is Arifovic and Ledyard (2012), which implements social preferences in tandem with an...

Research in behavioral economics suggests that in addition to their traditional incentive effects, formal control systems can influence psychological motivations. We extend this literature by demonstrating experimentally that formal controls directly influence people’s sense of what behaviors...