This paper deploys a novel experiment to compare four theories that explain both selfish and non-selfish cooperation. The four theories capture incomplete information (à la Kreps et al. (1982)) alongside the following four non-selfish motives: caring about others (Altruism), being conscientious...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays arepeated public good game to astrangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations.Subjects in the partners conditioncontribute from the first period on significantly more to the public good...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking "others' behaviour" a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

We compare voluntary contributions to the financing of a public good in a symmetric setting to those in asymmetric settings, in which four players have different, randomly allocated endowments. We observe that a weak asymmetry in the endowment distribution leads to the same contribution level as...

We report on an experiment examining behavior and equilibrium selection in two similar, infinitely repeated games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner's Dilemma under anonymous random matching. We are interested in the role that precedents may play for equilibrium selection between these two stage game...

We report the results of a series of experimental Bertrand duopolies where firms have convex costs. Theoretically, these duopolies are characterized by a multiplicity of Nash equilibria. Using a 2x2 design, we analyze price choices in symmetric and asymmetric markets under two information...

Many experimental studies deal with the comparison of two versions of one game for which agents' behavior is fundamentally different even though the Nash equilibrium is the same. This paper provides a novel approach to explain such findings. It uses the observation that many of these examples...

The paper presents the concept of an imitation equilibrium and explores it in the context of some simple oligopoly models. The concept applies to normal form games enriched by a reference structure specifying a reference group for every player. The reference group is a set of other players, whom...