When Chinese start-up DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025, the groundbreaking open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model rocked the tech industry as a more cost-effective alternative to models running on more advanced chips. The launch coincided with industrial policy gaining popularity as...

This study investigates how institutional rules and fairness in enforcement affect cooperation and compliance in heterogenous groups. In a preregistered online experiment (n = 1, 254), we vary both the existence of a rule governing contributions to a public good as well as whether enforcement of...

Gallice and Monzón (2019) present a natural environment that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can...

We analyze a public goods game with linearly increasing marginal returns to contributions, leading to a non-monotonic group payoff. By allowing the incentive to freeride to persist at all contribution levels, we preserve the usual social dilemma of voluntary public goods provision. We compare...

In social dilemmas, cooperation failures often arise due to the absence of mechanisms that prevent free-riding and enhance cooperation. Given the critical role these mechanisms play in sustaining cooperation, why are they so frequently missing? To explore this, we conducted an online experiment...

This paper examines how donor countries can be motivated by self-interest to fund emission reductions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While not solving the broader climate cooperation problem, we propose pragmatic measures that do not require global consensus on future climate risks...

Interrelated global crises - climate change, pandemics, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity - pose risks that demand collective solutions. Uncertainty about others' behavior, coupled with the dependence on some to take collective efforts to mitigate risks for all (e.g. conservation of...

The complexity of consumer free-riding behavior is a current significant problem, as modern online purchasing channels sharply compete with the traditional ones. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of showrooming behavior by free-rider consumers on product valuation within a...

Experimentation is at the core of innovation. This project studies collaborative experimentation in teams, focusing on the inherent two-dimensional free-riding problem induced by payoff and informational externalities. The discouraging force of observing others' unsuccessful experimentation and...

Proteins from animal sources, including meat, and plant-based foods are essential for a healthy human diet. However, animal-based proteins have significantly higher environmental impacts (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and water usage) and health risks (e.g., obesity, type 2...

A global monopoly supplier country of green goods which are essential for the provision of global environmental public goods optimally subsidizes the export of such goods in an interior contribution equilibrium. This is not counterbalanced by an incentive to improve the terms-of-trade, since any...

We characterize 'Games of Altruistic Cooperation' as a class of games in which cooperation leaves the individual and the group of decision-makers worse off than defection, but favors individuals outside the group. An example is climate change mitigation. In this context, we experimentally...

GoBs are goods for which agents have non-monotonic preferences: more is beneficial only up to an ideal level, beyond which additional quantities become undesirable. We analyze public GoBs (non-excludable and non-rival) through a theoretical framework applicable to diverse contexts such as solar...