We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the U.S.A. than anywhere else.

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences of five rounds of a twoperson public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence, subjects can select a new partner out of six...

Personality questionnaires have been used and can be used to predict behavior in economic settings. Using two sets of state-of-the-art measures from personality psychology (the Big Six) and social psychology (Social Value Orientation), we find that the behavior of men is predictable in the first...

We present a simple two-steps procedure for a within-subject test of the inequity aversion model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). In the first step, subjects played modified ultimatum and dictator games and were classified according to their preferences. In the second step, subjects with specific...

We present a simple two-steps procedure for a within-subject test of the inequity aversion model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). In the first step, subjects played modified ultimatum and dictator games and were classified according to their preferences. In the second step, subjects with specific...

This paper investigates in how far equity preferences may matter for climate negotiations. For this purposes we conducted a simple experiment with people who have been involved in international climate policy. The experiment, which was run via the Internet, consisted of two simple non-strategic...

The provision of public goods often relies on voluntary contributions and cooperation. While most of the experimental literature focuses on individual contributions, many real-world problems involve the formation of institutions among subgroups (coalitions) of players. International agreements...

This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a...

In this paper I examine the relationship between Pareto-optimality and group size in linear public goods games or experiments. In particular, I use the standard setting of homogeneous linear public goods experiments and apply a recently developed tool to identify all Pareto-optimal allocations...

We present a legislative bargaining model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizion. In each period, there is a societal endowment which can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the optimal public policy, defined by the time path of...