Punishment institutions for curtailing free-riding in social dilemmas rely on information about individuals’ behavior collected through monitoring. We contribute to the experimental study of cooperation-enhancing institutions by examining how cooperation and efficiency in a social dilemma...

Unit donations are an alternative fundraising scheme in which potential donors choose how many units of a charitable good to fund, rather than just giving money. Based on evidence from an online experiment with 8,673 participants, we demonstrate that well-designed unit donation schemes can...

This paper studies temporal factors influencing the effectiveness of don't drive appeals (DDAs) which policy-makers use to encourage motorists to voluntarily reduce driving during transitory high pollution episodes. We derive and empirically validate a theoretical framework for DDAs where the...

The exogenous manipulation of choice architectures to achieve social ends ('social nudges') can raise problems of effectiveness and ethicality because it favors group outcomes over individual outcomes. One answer is to give individuals control over their nudge ('self-nudge'), but the trade-offs...

Like many common-pool resources, the Lake Victoria fisheries are characterized by poor compliance with production input regulations that are intended to reduce overexploitation. To explore the use of input subsidies to increase compliance, we determine the subsidy level required to induce demand...

An influential result in the literature on charitable giving is that matching subsidies dominate rebate subsidies in raising funds. We investigate whether this result extends to 'unit donation' schemes, a popular alternative form of soliciting donations. There, the donors' choices are about the...

Charities frequently deviate from the standard donation scheme in which potential donors are asked how much money they are willing to give. Instead, they ask donors to choose how many units of a charitable good (e.g. meals, bed nets, or trees) to fund at a given unit price. In an online donation...

In a simplifying analytical framework with endogenous levels of actual and self-reported emissions, we consolidate the existing literature into three main hypotheses about the relative merits, for a resource-constrained regulator, of random (RAM) and competitive (CAM) audit mechanisms in the...

Anticipating "social risk", or risk caused by humans, affects decision-making differently from anticipating natural risk. Drawing upon a large sample of the US population (n=3,982), we show that the phenomenon generalizes to risk experience. Experiencing adverse outcomes caused by another human...

We provide causal evidence on how date marking policies influence consumers' valuation of perishable food products through three consecutive research steps. In a preparatory in-store survey (n = 100), we identify perishable food items that can be experimentally manipulated to overcome core...