We study the dynamics of the private provision of a public good that requires both capacity buildup and ongoing operating costs. We show that setting a time limit for the collection of contributions dedicated to capacity buildup minimizes the utility loss at the Nash equilibrium. We test the...

Attempts to curb illegal activity through regulation gets complicated when agents can adapt to circumvent enforcement. Economic theory suggests that conducting audits on a predictable schedule, and (counter-intuitively) at high frequency, can undermine the effectiveness of audits. We conduct a...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social...

Currently no refinement exists that successfully selects equilibria across a wider range of Cheap Talk games. We propose a generalization of refinements based on credible deviations, such as neologism proofness and announcement proofness. According to our Average Credible Deviation Criterion...

Recently economists have become interested in why people who face social dilemmas in the experimental lab use the seemingly incredible threat of punishment to deter free riding. Three theories have evolved to explain punishment. We survey each theory and se behavioral data from surveys and...

Recently economists have become interested in why people who face social dilemmas in the experimental lab use the seemingly incredible threat of punishment to deter free riding. Three theories with evolvutionary microfoundations have been developed to explain punishment. We survey these theories...

The observability of partners' past play is known to theoretically improve cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma game under random matching. This paper presents evidence from an incentivized experiment that reputational information per se may not improve cooperation. A...

We study the role of information about the multiplier in a finitely repeated investment game. A high multiplier increases the reputational incentives of a trustee, leading to more repayments. Our perfect Bayesian equilibrium analysis shows that if the trustee is privately informed about the...

We study experimentally whether heterogeneity of behavior in the Centipede game can be interpreted as the result of a learning process of individuals with different preference types (more and less pro-social) and coarse information regarding the opponent's past behavior. We manipulate the...