When the repeated prisoner's dilemma setup is generalized to allow for a unilateral breakup, maximal efficiency in equilibrium remains an open question. With restrictions of simple symmetry with eternal mutual cooperation, defection, or (matched) alternation on the equilibrium path, we describe...

A controversy has been simmering in law for at least 30 years about whether pro bono work should be mandatory for lawyers, who now donate 1-3% of their time to the poor. This has centered on the unmet legal needs of the poor, the duty of lawyers, and the contrast with US doctors, who are...

We use the differences between life satisfaction and emotional well-being of employed and unemployed persons to analyze how a person's employment status affects cognitive well-being. Our results show that unemployment has a negative impact on cognitive, but not on affective well-being, which we...

We use a controlled laboratory experiment with and without overlapping generations to study the emergence of public debt. Public debt is chosen by popular vote, pays for public goods, and is repaid with general taxes. With a single generation, public debt is accumulated prudently, never leading...

In a recent paper Konrad and Thum (2014) present a model that shows that unilateral pre-commitment reduces the likelihood of agreement in bilateral negotiations over the provision of a public good when parties have private information over their contribution costs. We test the model in a...

The dynamics of behavior observed in standard public-good experiments can be explained by imperfect conditional cooperation combined with social learning (Fischbacher and Gächter, 2010). But it is unclear what determines first-round contributions. We argue that first-round contributions depend...

A recent experimental study by Falk and Szech (Science, 2013) concludes that "markets erode moral values". If this were true, economists, who have emphasized the efficiency enhancing effects of markets for centuries, would have to reconsider their judgments fundamentally. This would be no less...

To examine the effect of group size on the stability of prosocial behavior we used standard one-shot public good experiments with two and four subjects, which were conducted repeatedly three times at intervals of one week. Partner and stranger treatments were employed to control for group...

Repeated experiments with a time span of one week between repetitions are used in order to test two related hypotheses. The first is the moral self-licensing effect, which describes people's tendency to allow themselves to act more selfishly on the back of previous prosocial or selfless...