Social and political inequality among individuals is a common driving force behind the breakdown in cooperation. In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally study cooperation among individuals faced with a sequence of collective-action problems in which the benefits to cooperation are...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

In many social dilemmas, individuals tend to generate a situation with low payoffs instead of a system optimum (tragedy of the commons). Is the routing of traffic a similar problem? In order to address this question, we present experimental results on humans playing a route choice game in a...

We describe an experiment based on a repeated two-person game of incomplete information designed so that Jordan's Bayesian model of learning in games and the best response model make completely opposite predictions. Econometric analysis of the experimental data, using the maximum likelihood...

In different treatments of an intergenerational common resource experiment, monetary payoff maximization by each generation causes either negative or positive externalities for future generations. Two behavioral types have been observed previously in single generation games: equity motivated...

This paper reports results from an experiment studying how fines, leniency programs and reward schemes for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without leniency reduces cartel formation, but increases cartel prices: subjects use costly fines as (altruistic) punishments....

In this paper we investigate how cognitive ability influences behavior, success and the evolution of play towards Nash equilibrium in repeated strategic interactions. We study behavior in a p-beauty contest experiment and find striking differences according to cognitive ability: more cognitively...

Recent research has shown that making people’s decisions known to others may enhance cooperation in infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games with random matching. This paper experimentally studies whether people can cooperate with each other by endogenously showing their identities and...

As seen in the Great East Japan Earthquake, people constantly face “abrupt changes” of which occurrence they cannot surely foresee. In this study, such “sudden changes” was defined as “catastrophes.” Building on this idea, the aim of this study is to indicate the evolution of...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over - a simple fresh start - leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new...