This paper experimentally studies two simple interventions aimed at increasing public goods provision in settings in which accurate feedback about contributions is not available. The first intervention aims to exploit lying aversion by requiring subjects to send a non-verifiable ex post...

A growing experimental literature studies the endogenous choice of institutions to solve cooperation problems arising in prisoners' dilemmas, public goods games, and common pool resource games. Participants in these experiments have the opportunity to influence the rules of the game before they...

Following the notion that organizations often face public good dilemmas when collective action is needed, we use a real-time provision-point mechanism to experimentally explore the process of achieving cooperative equilibria. Specifically, besides exploring group outcomes, we identify individual...

In this paper, we investigate whether dynamic incentive schemes lead to a ratchet effect in a social dilemma. We test whether subjects strategically restrict their contribution levels at the beginning of a cumulative public goods game in order to avoid high obligations in the future and how this...

We experimentally test a theoretically promising amendment to the ratchet-up mechanism of the Paris Agreement. The ratchet-up mechanism prescribes that parties’ commitments to the global response to climate change cannot decrease over time and our results confirm that its effect is...

Cyber attacks can impair banks operations and precipitate bank runs. When digital infrastructure is shared, banks defend themselves by investing in cybersecurity but can free-ride on the security measures of others. Ex ante free-riding by banks interacts with the ex post coordination frictions...

We study contracting between a public good provider and users with private valuations of the good. We show that, once the provider extracts the users' private information, she benefits from manipulating the collective information received from all users when communicating with them. We derive...

This paper examines the implications of habit formation in private and public consumption for the Pareto-efficient provision of public goods, based on a two-period model with nonlinear taxation. If the public good supply is time-invariant, the presence of habit formation generally alters the...