We examine the effect of payoff variations on cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma games. We focus on three factors: risk, temptation, and efficiency, which we vary as orthogonal treatments. We find that temptation has the largest impact on cooperation. Temptation directly deters...

We examine how conditional cooperation is related to the material payoffs in a Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma experiment. We have subjects play eight SPDs with varying payoffs, systematically varying the material gain to the second-mover and the material loss to the first-mover when the...

This study uses a three-person gift-exchange game experiment to examine the impact of pay comparisons on effort behavior. We compare effort choices made in a treatment where workers' wages are secret with effort choices made in two 'public wages' treatments. The two 'public wages' treatments...

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct a laboratory experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field and allows us to study the behavioral logic of social...

Using an experiment with incentivized decisions of groups in the economics laboratory, I investigate the effect of group diversity on group risk taking. I measure econometrically the effects of various aspects of subjects' diversity: nationality, language, university degree and gender. I find...

We investigate whether there is a link between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion. We use a public goods game to classify subjects by type of contribution preference and by belief about the contributions of others; and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject....

We experimentally investigate how different information about others' individual contributions affects conditional cooperators' willingness to cooperate in a one-shot linear public goods game. We find that when information about individual contributions is provided, contributions are generally...

A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate originates from a single party. This feature may raise concern about the...

We experimentally investigate how reputational concerns affect behavior in repeated Tullock contests by comparing expenditures of participants interacting in fixed groups with the expenditures of participants interacting with randomly changing opponents. When participants receive full...