We use a public-good experiment to analyze behavior in a decentralized asymmetric punishment institution. The institution is asymmetric in the sense that players differ in the effectiveness of their punishment. At the aggregate level, we observe remarkable similarities between outcomes in...

Exogenously given reputational information is known to improve cooperation. This paper experimentally studies how people create such information through reporting of partner's action choices, and whether the endogenous monitoring helps sustain cooperation, in an indefinitely repeated prisoner's...

A number of studies have shown that peer punishment can sustain cooperation in public good games. This paper shows that the format used to give subjects feedback is critical for the efficacy of punishment. Providing subjects with information about the earnings of their peers leads to lower...

A number of experimental studies have shown that the opportunity to punish anti-social behavior increases cooperation levels when agents face a social dilemma. Using a public good experiment, I show that in the presence of counter-punishment opportunities cooperators are less willing to punish...

A large body of literature has shown that peer-to-peer punishment is effective in enforcing cooperation norms in dilemmas. Kamei [2014, Economics Letters 124, pp.199-202] provides experimental evidence on the prevalence of heterogeneous conditional punishment types by conducting an experiment...

This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but this uncertainty cannot be cleared in any way (e.g.,...

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...

This paper presents the results of a threshold public goods game experiment with heterogeneous players. The experiment is designed in close collaboration with the Dutch association of agri-environmental farmer collectives. Subjects are recruited at a university (“the lab”) and a farm...

Previous experiments have found mixed results on whether honesty is intuitive or requires deliberation. Here we add to this literature by building on prior work of Capraro (2017). We report a large study (N=1,389) manipulating time pressure vs time delay in a deception game. We find that, in...

Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equates reputation with a transparent and complete history of players' past decisions, in real life, reputations are often...