The role of whistle-blowing as a mechanism for deterring corruption has been conspicuously neglected in the economic literature. This is quite surprising given the increase in legislation aimed at preventing corruption that includes whistle-blowing clauses and the extensive literature on...

Experimental and observational studies have highlighted the importance of agents being conditionally cooperative when facing a social dilemma. We formalize this mechanism in a theoretical model that portrays a small community having joint access to a common pool resource. The diffusion of norms...

The literature on social norms has often stressed that social disapproval is crucial to foster compliance with norms and promote fair and cooperative behavior. With this in mind, we explore the disapproval of allocation decisions using experimental data from five dictator games with a feedback...

We study how group size affects cooperation in an infinitely repeated n-player Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game. In each repetition of the game, groups of size n less than or equal to M are randomly and anonymously matched from a fixed population of size M to play the n-player PD stage game. We...

Social interactions arguably provide a rationale for several important phenomena, from smoking and other risky behavior in teens to e.g., peer effects in school performance. We study social interactions in dynamic economies. For these economies, we provide existence (Markov Perfect Equilibrium...

This paper explores the scope for synthesis between economic and systemic approaches to the understanding of legal evolution. The evolutionary and epistemic branches of game theory predict that stable norms will emerge when agents share common beliefs concerning future states of the world....

Social interactions arguably provide a rationale for several important phenomena, from smoking and other risky behavior in teens to e.g., peer effects in school performance. We study social interactions in dynamic economies. For these economies, we provide existence (Markov Perfect Equilibrium...

Experimental and observational studies have highlighted the importance of agents being conditionally cooperative when facing a social dilemma. We formalize this mechanism in a theoretical model that portrays a small community having joint access to a common pool resource. The diffusion of norms...

Real world observations suggest that social norms of cooperation can be effective in overcoming social dilemmas such as the joint management of a common pool resource – but also that they can be subject to slow erosion and sudden collapse. We show that these patterns of erosion and collapse...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...