A recent series of papers has introduced a fresh perspective on the problem of the evolution of human cooperation by suggesting an amendment to the concept of cooperation itself: instead of thinking of cooperation as playing a particular strategy in a given game, usually C in the prisoner's...

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is widely used to model social interaction between unrelated individuals in the study of the evolution of cooperative behaviour in humans and other species. Many effective mechanisms and promotive scenarios have been studied which allow for small founding groups of...

In evolutionary models of indirect reciprocity, reputation mechanisms can stabilize cooperation even in severe cooperation problems like the prisoner's dilemma. Under certain circumstances, conditionally cooperative strategies ("cooperate iff your partner has a good reputation") cannot be...

We examine whether compliance with the law is associated with prosocial behavior. We test whether people who comply with parking rules are more likely to reply to a survey than people who did not comply with parking rules. We find that parking rule followers have significantly higher response...

Ethics is a field in which the gap between words and actions looms large. Game theory and the empirical methods it inspires look at behavior instead of the lip service people sometimes pay to norms. We believe that this special issue comprises several illustrations of the fruitful application of...

We examine geographical concentration, scientific quality, and editorial favoritism in the field of experimental economics. We use a novel data set containing all original research papers (𝑁 = 583) that exclusively used laboratory experiments for data generation and were published in the...

The historical record knows only few instances of democracies waging war against each other. Therefore, democratization is considered key in achieving global peace. However, efforts to achieve sustained democratic governance often fail-Afghanistan being a recent example. Democratization appears...

Phenomena like meat sharing in hunter-gatherers, altruistic self-sacrifice in intergroup conflicts, and contribution to the production of public goods in laboratory experiments have led to the development of numerous theories trying to explain human prosocial preferences and behavior. Many of...