Reliable institutions - i.e., institutions that live up to the norms that agents expect them to keep - foment cooperative behavior. We experimentally confirm this hypothesis in a public goods game with a salient norm that cooperation was socially demanded and corruption ought not to occur. When...

We investigate the impact of various audit schemes on the future provision of public goods, when contributing less than the average of the group is sanctioned exogenously and the probability of an audit is unknown. We study how individuals update their beliefs about the probability of being...

Previous research has shown that opportunities for two-sided partner choice in finitely repeated social dilemma games can promote cooperation through a combination of sorting and opportunistic signaling, with late period defections by selfish players causing an end-game decline. How such...

Several studies have shown that social identity fosters the provision of public goods and enhances the willingness to reciprocate cooperative behavior of group members dependent on the social environment. Yet, the question of how social identity affects negative reciprocity in...

We study the dynamics of the private provision of a public good that requires both capacity buildup and ongoing operating costs. We show that setting a time limit for the collection of contributions dedicated to capacity buildup minimizes the utility loss at the Nash equilibrium. We test the...

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,...

In this paper, we investigate the joint influence of empirical and normative expectations on cooperative behavior. We conduct two experimental studies (n = 243) in which we separately elicit (i) behavior in a public goods game and (ii) social norms under the form of normative and empirical...