Participants in a public goods experiment receive private or common signals regarding the so-called "point of no return", meaning that if the group's total contribution falls below this point, all payoffs are reduced. An individual faces the usual conflict between private and collective...

Efficiently growing a group or firm often requires integration of individuals from lower-performing entities. We explore the effectiveness of two policies intended to facilitate such integration, using a laboratory experiment that models production as a coordination game with Pareto-ranked...

We develop a competitive equilibrium theory of a market for votes. Before voting on a binary issue, individuals may buy and sell their votes with each other. We define the concept of ex ante vote-trading equilibrium, and show by construction that an equilibrium exists. The equilibriumwe...

This paper investigates mechanisms for the private provision of a public good which utilize competition to incentivize contributions. Theory predicts that “all-pay” competition is particularly effective for fundraising. Within this class of mechanisms different types of lotteries and all-pay...

This paper both theoretically and experimentally studies the properties of plurality and approval voting when the majority is divided as a result of information imperfections. The minority backs a third alternative, which the majority views as strictly inferior. The majority thus faces two...

We investigate the effects of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the share contest a contestant receives a share of the rent equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures, while in the lottery contest a contestant wins the entire rent with...

Many resource allocation contests have the property that individuals undertake costly actions to appropriate a potentially divisible resource. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three resource allocation contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality. The...

Free riding can be made more costly by increasing either the probability of being caught or the severity of the punishment. However, neither option is without cost. What is the tradeoff between these strategies? In this study, we introduce an exogenous punishment mechanism that varies the...

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. The assignment of individuals to groups as either strangers or partners does not significantly affect this...

We conduct an experiment on price competition in a segmented market. Each segment contains one seller and one consumer, and consumers incur transportation costs when they buy from a seller located in another segment. We observe persistent price dispersion in our experimental markets with the...