In public goods environments, the threat to punish non-contributors may increase contributions. However, this threat may make players' contributions less informative about their true social preferences. This lack of information may lead to lower contributions after the threat disappears, as we...

Religion and ritual have been characterized as costly ways for conditional cooperators to signal their type, and thus identify and interact with one another. But an effective signal may be prohibitively expensive: if the cost of participation is too small, freeriders may send the signal and...

Previous work has found that in social dilemmas, the selfish always free-ride, while others will cooperate if they expect their peers to do so as well. Outcomes may thus depend on conditional cooperators� beliefs about the number of selfish types. An early round of the game may be played...

When person A takes an action that can be interpreted as �making an offer� to person B and B �rejects the offer,� then A may �lose face.� This loss of face (LoF) and consequent disutility will occur only if these actions are common knowledge to A and B. While under some circumstances...