Summary Extortive petty corruption takes place when a public official elicits small bribes from citizens for providing public services that the citizens are legally entitled to receive. We implement a novel experimental design that mimics this phenomenon and explores bottom-up approaches for its...

This paper examines whether exposure to persistent resource scarcity on the commons affects pastoralists' readiness to engage in antisocial behavior towards their fellow commons users. The region under study is divided into two areas according to exogenous variations in biomass production...

We present econometric evidence of how sociodemographic characteristics, economic background, group effects, and dynamic personal and group interactions influence the co-operative behaviour of individuals in a social dilemma situation. The data are from a framed common-pool resource experiment...

Namaqualand government officials face a strong obligation to empower formerly disadvantaged communities by delegating tasks or devolving power. Theoretically, the external agents capitalize on existing network structures, norms, and trust relations within a village in order to stimulate...

We examine the effectiveness of three democratically chosen rules that alleviate the coordination and cooperation problems inherent in collectively managed common-pool resources. In particular we investigate how rule effectiveness and rule compliance depend on the prevailing local norms and...

This paper reports on a one-shot trust experiment with and without third party punishment (TPP). Participants were recruited such that each session contains multiple people who are friends, family members, and unrelated villagers. Participants were either paired with one of their reported family...

Context affects decision-making in many ways. In this paper we explore differences in cooperation behaviour between communal farmers in Namibia and South Africa, who share the same ethnic origin but have had different historical and ecological constraints. We report on a series of field...

Common pool resource experiments in the laboratory and the field have provided insights that have contrasted to those derived from conventional non-cooperative game theory. Contrary to predictions from non-cooperative game theory, participants are sometimes willing to restrain voluntarily from...