We use a two-person linear voluntary contribution mechanism with stochastic marginal benefits from the public good to examine the effect of imperfect information on contributions levels. To assess prior risk attitudes, individual valuations of several risky prospects are elicited via a...

We study the effects of leadership on the private provision of a public good when group members are heterogeneously endowed. Leadership is implemented as a sequential public goods game where one group member contributes first and all the others follow. Our results show that the presence of a...

We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when condi-tional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon oftenobserved in public goods experiments and in real life. Formally, conditionalcooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an...

We conducted a laboratory study with a public goods game in which contributions are notsubmitted all at once but incrementally as coordinated in real time by a clock. Individualspress a button as soon as the clock equals their willingness to contribute. This publicgoods institution exploits the...

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public goodthat avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is in-creased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the...

We exploit the aggregative structure of the public good modelto provide a simple analysis of the voluntary contribution game. Incontrast to the best response function approach, ours avoids the pro-liferation of dimensions as the number of players is increased, andcan readily analyse games...

Recent research has cast some doubt on the general validity of outcome-basedmodels of social preferences. We develop a model based on cognitive dissonance thatfocuses on the importance of self-image. An experiment (a dictator game variant)tests the model.First, we nd that subjects whose choices...

We analyze the effects of asymmetric information concerning thesize of a pie on proposer behavior in three different bargaining situations:the ultimatum game, the Yes-No-game and the dictator game.Our data show that (a) irrespective of the information condition, proposergenerosity increases with...

We perform an experimenta linvestigation using a dictator game inwhich individuals must make a moral decision —to give or not to give anamount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire inwhich the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision showsthat, at least in...

´This paper aims to analize the role of personal identity indecision making. To this end, it starts by reviewing criticallythe growing literature on economics and identity. Consideringthe ambiguities that the concept of social identity poses, our proposalfocuses on the concept of personal...