We examine the characteristics of effective leaders in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: the individual's cooperativeness and the individual's beliefs about the cooperativeness of others. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are...

Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. In...

One of the outstanding results of three decades of laboratory market research is that under rather weak conditions prices and quantities in competitive experimental markets converge to the competitive equilibrium. Yet, the design of these experiments ruled out gift exchange or reciprocity...