We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the United States than anywhere else.

Experimental studies have compared cooperation across different nonmarket social dilemma settings, but the experimental literature has largely overlooked comparing cooperation across market and nonmarket settings. This paper reports the results from an experiment that compares behavior in...

We add social norms into Laffont’s mechanism designed for environmental risk. We find with endogenous social norms and asymmetric information about personal norms, the optimal contract induces more (less) effort from the “green” (“brown”) firm.

This paper considers whether earned wealth affects bidding behavior in an induced-value second-price auction. We find people bid more sincerely in the auction with earned wealth given monetary incentives; earned wealth did not induce sincere bidding in hypothetical auctions.

We explore whether the recent laboratory findings that suggest the origin of endowment matters in simple bargaining games are actually due to contextual shifts of relative effort and deservingness. Results support previous findings of endowment origin yielding more self-interested behavior.