Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

Recent public goods experiments have shown that free riding can be curtailed through mutual monitoring and sanctioning between members of a group. However, often we can not allow for punishment and exclude the possibility of counter-punishment occurring. We design a public goods experiment,...

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 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,...

Should people be allowed to leave joint projects freely or should they be deterred from breaking off? This depends on why people stop collaborating and whether they have good reasons to do so. We explore the factors that lead to the breakdown of partnerships by studying a public good game with...

Laws consist of two components: the 'obligations' they express and the 'incentives' designed to enforce them.In this paper we run a public good experiment to test whether or not obligations have any independent effect on cooperation in social dilemmas.The results show that, for given marginal...

How formal institutions (e.g. laws and public policies) affect human behaviour represents a crucial issue in economic analysis. Formal rules are defined as obligations backed by incentives. The economic literature has largely studied the role of material incentives in shaping individual...

Should people be allowed to leave joint projects freely or should they be deterred from breaking off? This depends on why people stop collaborating and whether they have good reasons to do so. We explore the factors that lead to the breakdown of partnerships by studying a public good game with...

Should people be allowed to leave joint projects freely or should they be deterred from breaking off? This depends on why people stop collaborating and whether they have good reasons to do so. We explore the factors that lead to the breakdown of partnerships by studying a public good game with...

We elicit human conditional punishment types by conducting experiments. We find that their punishment decisions to an individual are on average significantly positively proportional to other members’ punishment decisions to that individual.