The function of communal water supply utilities is to provide consumers with high quality drinking water in sufficient quantities. On the other hand communal wastewater disposal utilities have to dispose the wastewater. In addition to this water prices and wastewater charges shall also give...

Die Aufgabe der kommunalen Wasserversorgungsunternehmen besteht darin, die Verbraucher mit qualitativ hochwertigem Trinkwasser in ausreichender Menge zu versorgen. Auf der anderen Seite müssen die kommunalen Abwasserentsorgungsbetriebe das von den Grundstückseigentümern erzeugte Abwasser...

Corruption is a widespread phenomenon. Nevertheless, causal evidence on the effects of corruption is still lacking. In this paper, we assess whether and how corruption affects cooperation using a public good game experiment. Overall, contributions to the public good are reduced by 30% when...

Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems where social and biophysical agents are interacting at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The main challenge for the study of governance of social-ecological systems is improving our understanding of the conditions under which cooperative...

Communication is well known to increase cooperation rates in social dilemma situations, but the exact mechanisms behind this have been questioned and discussed. This study examines the impact of communication on public good provisioning in an artefactual field experiment conducted with 216...

International climate negotiations have so far failed to produce ambitious climate cooperation. We combine laboratory experiments with simulations to investigate the performance of two negotiation design features to address this failure: The Paris Agreement's ratchet-up mechanism, which requires...

We experimentally test different rule-based contribution mechanisms in a repeated 4-player public goods game with endowment heterogeneity and compare them to a VCM, distinguishing between a random- and an effort-based allocation of endowments. We find that endowment heterogeneities limit the...

We experimentally investigate cooperation in privileged groups which according to Olson (1965) are groups in which at least one member has an incentive to supply a positive amount of the public good. More specifically, we analyze group member heterogeneity with respect to two dimensions:...

This paper demonstrates that cooperation in international environmental negotiations can be explained by preferences for equity. Within a N-country prisoner's dilemma in which agents can either cooperate or defect, in addition to the standard non-cooperative equilibrium, cooperation of a large...

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...