We treat instructions as an experimental variable to study how their format affects the participants’ comprehension, speed of play, and experimental behavior. We find that, in a public good game, short on-screen instructions requiring forced inputs improve on subjects’ comprehension and...

We investigate parochial altruism, the combination of in-group altruism and out-group hostility, in an experimental conflict game preceded by a prisoner’s dilemma. Our data are consistent with parochial altruism, but cannot be explained by in-group pro-sociality or out-group hostility alone.

In a one-shot Prisoners’ dilemma experiment, female participants are highly sensitive to the social frame. Male participants are not.

Shotgun clauses are commonly included in the business agreements of partnerships and limited liability companies (LLCs), but the role of offeror typically remains unassigned. In a common-value, one-sided asymmetric information setting, unequal and inefficient outcomes occur with an unassigned...

This paper examines how a religious festival (Ramadan) and the degree of religiosity affect cooperation and costly punishment in a public goods experiment. We find significantly higher cooperation levels outside the festival among less religious people. This behavior is consistent with a...

We report the results of experiments designed to investigate the effects of random public revelation of individual choices on voluntary contributions to a public good. Varying the number of subjects whose contributions are made public, we find that public revelation always leads to higher...

I examine two dimensions of framing in public goods games: Contributing vs. Taking and Gains vs. Losses. I find decreased cooperation under the Taking frame, but not under the Loss frame. This framing effect is stronger for men than women.

Decisions on joint funding of continuous public goods between two agents often involve heterogeneous targets. We introduce loss functions in a contribution game in order to study the effect of this conflict. Unlike Varian (1994), joint contribution occurs only if the players’ targets are...