While numerous experiments demonstrate how pro-sociality can influence economic decision-making, evidence on explicitly anti-social economic behavior has thus far been limited. In this paper we investigate the importance of spite in experimental rent-seeking contests. Although, as we show,...

This paper investigates mechanisms for the private provision of a public good which utilize competition to incentivize contributions. Theory predicts that 'all-pay' competition is particularly effective for fundraising. Within this class of mechanisms different types of lotteries and all-pay...

We study how conflict in contest games is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The theoretical prediction is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and...

We report the results of laboratory experiments on rent-seeking contests with endogenous participation. Theory predicts that (a) contest entry and rent-seeking expenditures increase with the size of the prize; and (b) earnings are equalized between the contest and the outside option. While the...

We examine the effects of social preferences and beliefs about the social preferences of others in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are reciprocally oriented. Part of the effect can be explained by a false consensus...

Belief elicitation is an important methodological issue for experimental economists. There are two generic questions: 1) Do incentives increase belief accuracy? 2) Are there interaction effects of beliefs and decisions? We investigate these questions in the case of finitely repeated public goods...

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting. In one parameterization we find that overall provision is lower under sequential than simultaneous contributions, as predicted, but the distribution of contributions...

We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay...

We investigate the effects of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the deterministic contest a contestant receives a share of the rent equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures, while in the stochastic contest a contestant wins the entire...

We use a limited information environment to assess the role of confusion in the repeated voluntary contributions game. A comparison with play in a standard version of the game suggests, that the common claim that decision errors due to confused subjects biases estimates of cooperation upwards,...