We test the hypothesis that protest participation decisions in an adult population of potential climate protesters are interdependent. Subjects (n = 1,510) from the four largest German cities were recruited two weeks before protest date. We measured participation (ex post) and beliefs about the...

Major climate-cum-energy policies and respective impact projections rest on the widespread belief that increased energy efficiency can be equated with savings in energy use and emissions. This belief is flawed. Due to the rebound effect emissions savings from energy efficiency improvements will...

In a laboratory experiment we study how costly punishment behavior of second and third parties in a social dilemma situation is affected by monitoring costs. Subjects have to pay a fee over and above punishment costs if they wish to condition punishments on previous play, which is equivalent to...

Enforcement agencies issuing warnings are an empirical regularity in the enforcement of laws and regulations, but a challenge to the standard economic theory of public enforcement. A number of recent contributions explain the popularity of warnings as a response to information asymmetries...

Is feedback on trustworthiness necessary for the functioning of economic relationships? In many real-world economic environments, such feedback can at best be acquired through costly monitoring, raising questions of how trust and efficiency can be maintained. In the lab, we conduct a modified...

This paper studies monitoring and punishment behavior by second and third parties in a cooperation experiment with endogenous information structures: Players are uninformed whether the target player cooperated or defected at the cooperation stage, but can decide to resolve the information...

This thesis is about the relationship between transparency and cooperation. Fixing a particular group of individuals, the basic question can be posed as follows: What does the propensity of those individuals to cooperate with one another has to do with the availability of information they have...