The most evident shortcoming of the international agreements on climate actions is the compliance to their prescriptions. Can John Rawls’s social contract theory help us to solve the problem? We apply the veil of ignorance decision-making setting in a sequential dictator game to study the...

In social dilemmas punishment costs resources, not just from the one who is punished but often also from the punisher and society. Reciprocity on the other side is known to lead to cooperation without the costs of punishment. The questions at hand are whether punishment brings advantages besides...

The present paper draws on data collected through a Traveler's Dilemma experiment where the possibility of consuming relational goods is introduced by allowing (or forcing) agents to meet after the experiment. It enriches the literature on social distance by comparing the effect of its reduction...

In real life, punishment is often implemented only insofar as punishers are entitled to punish and punishees deserve to be punished. We provide an experimental test for this principle of legitimacy in the framework of a public goods game, by comparing it with a classic (unrestricted) punishment...

We experimentally investigate cooperation within a finitely repeated public goods game framework where peer punishment is possible but, unlike previous work, in each round access to sanctioning power is exclusively awarded to the group’s top contributor. We compare this mechanism with a...

Level-k and team reasoning theories, among others, have been used to explain experimental evidence on coordination games. Both theories succeed in explaining some results and both fail in explaining other results. Sometimes it is impossible to discriminate between them. For this reason we...

The aim of this paper is to study the role of the “common reason to believe” (Sugden in Philos Explor 16:165–181, <CitationRef CitationID="CR51">2003</CitationRef>) and the reduction of social distance within the theory of team reasoning. The analysis draws on data collected through a Traveler’s Dilemma experiment. To study the...</citationref>

In dealing with peer punishment as a cooperation enforcement device, laboratory studies have typically concentrated on discretionary sanctioning, allowing players to castigate each other arbitrarily. By contrast, in real life punishments are often meted out only insofar as punishers are entitled...