Transparency and accountability are often regarded as crucial for good governance and the efficient organization of public affairs. To systematically explore the impact of transparency and accountability on cooperation, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments on a variation of the public...

Economists have a long tradition in identifying the evolution of cooperation in large, unstructured societies as a puzzle. We suggest a new explanation for cooperation which avoids restrictions of most previous attempts. Our explanation deals with the role of internalized norms for cooperation...

In this paper we analyze how ratification uncertainty impacts the optimal terms of international environmental agreements (IEAs). We relax the frequent assumption of countries as unitary actors by modeling the ratification stage through uncertain preferences of a ratifying agent (e.g. the...

In classic game theory, agents use mixed strategies in the form of objective and probabilistically precise devices to conceal their actions. We introduce the larger set of probabilistically imprecise devices as strategies and study the consequences for the basic results of normal form games....