In the Solidarity Game (Selten and Ockenfels, 1998), two "rich" persons can support a "poor" one. A strong positive correlation between one rich person's solidarity contribution and his expected contribution of the other is observed. This paper investigates the causality behind this correlation....

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. We analyze an exogenous linking...

Prior research demonstrates a willingness to incur costs to punish norm violators. But, how strong are the motives underlying such acts? Will people rely on "excuses" to avoid acting on costly punishment intentions, as with other costly pro-social acts? In a laboratory experiment, we find that...

We investigate the effect of a donation incentive tied to contributions to a public good when group members can decide on the size of the donation to be made. An up to 20 % donation of the public good was implemented either exogenously or endogenously by group members. In the Vote treatment,...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. We analyze an exogenous linking...

Prior research demonstrates a willingness to incur costs to punish norm violators. But, how strong are the motives underlying such acts? Will people rely on "excuses" to avoid acting on costly punishment intentions, as with other costly pro-social acts? In a laboratory experiment, we find that...

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social...

What is the role of intuitive versus deliberative cognitive processing in human cooperation? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that (i) intuition favors behaviors that are typically advantageous (i.e. long-run payoff-maximizing), and that for most people cooperation is typically...

Two separate bodies of work have examined whether culture affects cooperation in economic games and whether cooperative or non-cooperative decisions occur more quickly. Here, we connect this work by exploring the relationship between decision time and cooperation in American versus Indian...

Are cooperative decisions typically made more quickly or slowly than non-cooperative decisions? While this question has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most research has focused on one-shot interactions. Yet it is repeated interactions that characterize most important...