A robust nding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initialcontribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports onan exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when condi-tional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon oftenobserved in public goods experiments and in real life. Formally, conditionalcooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an...

This note analyses investment and risk-taking in a simple agency model of public regulation/procurement borrowed from Laffont & Tirole (1993). We show that the principal will overinvest or underinvest depending on whether investment is marginally more productive in bad or in good states. Due to...

In public good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of its membersfind it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, their inherentasymmetric nature may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informalsanctioning harder to accomplish...

We examine the effects of leading by example in voluntary contributionexperiments. Leadership is implemented by letting one group membercontribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadershipincreases contributions in comparison to the standard voluntary contributionmechanism,...

We report the results of an experimental study that compares voting mechanismsin the provision of public goods. Subjects can freely decide how much they want tocontribute. Whether the public good is finally provided is decided by a referendumunder full information about all contributions. If...

In this paper we investigate the effects of local interaction in a CPR-like environment.We employ a local interaction model where subjects are allocated alonga circle and only interact with their most direct neighbors. In traditional socialdilemma experiments, the return of one’s actions is...

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntarycontribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences offive rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end ofeach sequence, subjects can select a new partner out of six...