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...

In the experiment two bureaucrats independently can grant a permitwith the profit of the private party depending on when the permit is given.Whereas one bureaucrat can only veto the project, the second one hasadditional discretion in granting the permit earlier or later. We speakof greasing when...

Similar to Levati and Neugebauer (2001), a clock is used by which participantscan vary their individual contributions for voluntarily providing apublic good. As time goes by, participants either in(de)crease their contributiongradually or keep it constant. Groups of two poorly and two...

We conducted a laboratory study with a public goods game in which contributions are notsubmitted all at once but incrementally as coordinated in real time by a clock. Individualspress a button as soon as the clock equals their willingness to contribute. This publicgoods institution exploits the...

In this paper we study the robustness of the deadline effect in bargaininggames using constant and slowly decreasing pies, different time horizons,and both constant and alternating role modes. With decreasing pies efficiency requires early agreements while constant pies allow for efficient late...

Two firms, each consisting of a team with the owner and just oneemployee, compete on the labor market with free labor mobility. Afterobserving the investment decisions by firm owners their employees canengage in costly training, thus increasing their general and firm-specificproductivity, which...

This paper revisits and extends the experiment on the solidarity gameby Selten and Ockenfels (1998). We replicate the basic design of the solidaritygame and extend it in order to test the robustness of the fixed totalsacrifice' effect and the applied strategy method. Our results only...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview on the Virtual Laboratory infrastructurefor online economic experiments. We summarize our experience gainedfrom performing several economic experiments on the Internet. The experimentswe have run range from electronic markets to individual...

We investigate experimentally whether entry costs have an impact on the evolutionof cooperation in a social dilemma game. In particular, subjects repeatedly playthe so-called takeover game with anonymous partners randomly drawn from a fixedpopulation of participants. The game represents a social...

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,...