This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider an urban area in Germany where the Catholic Church collects a local church levy as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. In cooperation with the...

Many mechanisms have been designed to solve the free-rider problem in public good environments. The designers of those mechanisms focused on good static equilibrium properties. In this paper, I propose a new mechanism for the provision of public goods that has good dynamic properties instead....

The Conditional Contribution Mechanism for public good provision gives all agents the possibility to condition their contribution on the total level of contribution provided by all agents. In this experimental study the mechanism's performance is compared to the performance of the Voluntary...

This study clarifies the types of motives that are important as a source of cooperation in a linear public goods experiment. Our experimental design separates the contributions due to confusion, one-shot motives (which includes altruism, warm-glow, inequality aversion, and conditional...

The authors extend the standard public goods game in a variety of ways, in particular by allowing for endogenous preference over institutions and by studying the relationship between individual types, their preferences, and later behavior within the various institutional environments. They...

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...

In many cases individuals benefit differently from the provision of a public good. We study in a laboratory experiment how heterogeneity in returns and uncertainty affects unconditional and conditional contribution behavior in a linear public goods game. The elicitation of conditional...

We experimentally investigate cooperation in privileged groups which according to Olson (1965) are groups in which at least one member has an incentive to supply a positive amount of the public good. More specifically, we analyze group member heterogeneity with respect to two dimensions:...

This paper derives Pareto efficient policy rules for the provision of national as well as global public goods in a two-country world, where each individual cares about relative consumption within as well as between countries. Furthermore, we compare these policy rules with those that follow from...

A unique data-set from Indonesia is analysed to understand what individuals know about the income distribution in their village to test theories such as Jackson and Rogers (2007) that link information aggregation in networks to the structure of the network. The observed patterns are consistent...