This updated draft paper explores the significant role Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis (RCBA) plays in facilitating or impeding collective action. Through case studies, the paper shows that well-constructed RCBAs have (1) facilitated collective action (including in cases where explicit...

Subjects in collective action experiments like the voluntary contribution mechanism (Davis and Holt, 1993) display varying predispositions ranging from stronger or weaker inclinations to cooperate (including willingness to engage in costly punishment of non-cooperators) to relatively...

Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity consists of culturally transmitted ideas and skills that underpin the operation of institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural...

Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, George Williams, and Stephen J. Gould, among others, have pointed out that observing that a certain behavior causes a certain effect does not itself license the inference that the effect was the result of intent or design to bring about that effect....

Field experiments with asymmetric commons dilemmas have shown that groups who are able to derive high social efficiency also had higher equity compared to groups who were not able to derive significant levels of social efficiency. We present an agent-based model based on cultural group selection...

Cooperation has been vital to the evolution of all living things, including single-celled organisms (Velicer, 2005, 2003; Velicer and Stredwick, 2002; Crespi, 2001; Velicer et al., 2000; Boorman and Levitt, 1980), fish (Brosnan et al., 2003; Dugatkin, 1991, 1992, 1997; Milinski, 1987), birds (Brown and Brown, 1996; Faaborg...

This essay introduces a neurologically-informed formal model of collective action that reveals the role for empathy and distress in motivating costly helping behaviors. This model is based on a brain circuit that our lab has recently characterized called HOME (Human Oxytocin Mediated Empathy)...

Asset market bubbles occur dependably in laboratory experiments. They have also been frequent in economic history, yet they do not usually bring the global economy to its knees. The ongoing Crash of 2008 was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble of unusual size, fed by a massive expansion...

quot;There is no duty more indispensable than that of returning a kindness. All men distrust one forgetful of a benefitquot;. Although all primate species exhibit altruism towards genetic relatives, humans are exceptional in the extent to which we cooperate with non-relatives (Bowles and Gintis...