Since Olson's (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, the exploitation hypothesis, in which the rich shoulders the provision burden of public goods for the poor, has held sway despite empirical exceptions. To address such exceptions, we establish two alternative exploitation hypotheses based on...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays arepeated public good game to astrangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations.Subjects in the partners conditioncontribute from the first period on significantly more to the public good...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking "others' behaviour" a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...