A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

The dilemma of collective action around water use and management involves solving both the problems of provision and appropriation. Cooperation in the provision can be affected by the rival nature of the appropriation and the asymmetries in the access. We report two field experiments conducted...

There is not general consensus about if women are more or less generous than men. Although the number of papers supporting more generous females is a bit larger than the opposed it is not possible to establish any definitive and systematic gender bias. This paper provides new evidence on this...

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a model of payoff sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data, including single-peaked frequency distributions, the persistent use of...

Cooperation and competition are both essential elements of economic life. Here we explore how cooperativeness in a prisoner’s dilemma is correlated with competitiveness in a sample of 9-12 year old children in Colombia and Sweden. Using two different measures and four different tasks for...

Watersheds and irrigation systems have the characteristic of connecting people vertically by water flows. The location of users along these systems defines their role in the provision and appropriation of water which adds complexity to the potential for cooperation. Verticality thus imposes a...