A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

Explanations of poverty, growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour. Economic experiments, especially those conducted in the field, have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing...

Differences in group affiliation may affect the level of cooperation in global commons situations such as programs for the conservation of resources which generate benefits that transcend state boundaries. We design a real-time, cross-cultural common pool resource (CPR) experiment purposely...

We design a real-time, intercultural common pool resource experiment using participants from cultures that derive different benefits from a global public good (extraction vs. conservation of biodiversity resources) to analyze the effect of group affiliation on cooperative behavior. We also...

"In particular, the academic debate over the best prediction about the behavior of people that use a common-pool resource (CPR), and the recommended policy approaches to the CPR dilemma have undergone a very interesting evolution throughout the last 3 decades of the pastcentury, since the...

Economic loss to society due to dishonesty can be quite large. Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across sixteen countries. This...

Community mobilization is a key feature of community-based development projects. Community mobilization requires facilitating communication between village members and between leaders and the rest of the community. Is communication an effective device through which mobilization may foster...

This paper explores the extent to which individuals trust, reciprocate, cooperate and pool risk by using a battery of field experiments containing the trust game, the voluntary contributions mechanism and the risk pooling game; applied in six capital cities in Latin America. The results suggest...