This article examines the nature of human behavior in a nested social dilemma referred to as the Spillover Game. Players are divided into two groups with positive production interdependencies. Based on theoretically derived opportunistic, local, and global optima, our experimental results...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

The provision of public goods regularly embodies interrelated spheres of influence on multiple scales. This article examines the nature of human behavior in a multilevel social dilemma game with positive provision externalities to local and global scales. We report experimental results showing...

It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable...

We investigate experimentally the underlying motivations and individual differences with regard to the participation in between-group conflict in nested social dilemmas. In our nested social dilemmas, the collective is divided into two groups, and individuals allocate tokens between a private, a...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

We study a class of trust dilemmas with symmetric players that evolve in real-time. In these games, as long as all the n players continue to cooperate, the payoff function increases exponentially over time. Simultaneously, however, the temptation to defect also increases at the same rate. The...

We experimentally study the impact of framing effects in a repeated sequential social dilemma game. Our between-subjects design consists of two group level (“Wall Street” vs. “Community”) and two individual level (“First (Second) Movers” vs. “Leaders (Followers)”) frames. We find...

This paper investigates how the possibility of affecting group composition combined with the possibility of repeated interaction impacts cooperation within groups and surplus distribution. We developed and tested experimentally a Surplus Allocation Game where cooperation of four agents is needed...

We experimentally disentangle two potential sources for endogenous social interactions effects. By comparing groups where the group norm is publicly observable with those where it is not we can measure the size of any endogenous observation effect. By comparing connected with disconnected groups...