According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The...

We analyze group contests for public goods by applying the solution concept of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). We show that a global ESS cannot exist, because a mutant free-rider can always invade group behavior successfully. There does exist, however, a unique local ESS, which we...

This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation in which the players have access to two-armed bandits where the risky arm distributes lumpsum payoffs according to a Poisson process with unknown intensity. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in...

Empirical evidence is provided for the importance of non-reciprocal pro-social behavior of individuals in an anonymous, n-person pure public good setting. A unique panel data set of 136,000 observations is matched with an extensive survey. Even under anonymous conditions, a large number of...

We study framing effects in repeated social dilemmas by comparing payoff-equivalent Give- and Take-framed public goods games under varying matching mechanisms (Partners or Strangers) and levels of feedback (Aggregate or Individual). In the Give-framed game, players contribute to a public good,...