We experimentally investigate the impact of visibility of contributors and cost of information on public good contributions. First, we vary recognizing all, highest or lowest contributors. Second, we investigate the effect of imposing a cost on viewing contributors. Recognizing all contributors...

We run an experiment with users of internet message boards. We find that forum users cooperate more with partners of their own forum than with partners from a different forum but they are equally altruistic when they made a gift to a partner of their forum or from another one. We also find that...

Evolutionary game theory has shown that in environments characterised by a social-dilemma situation punishment may be an adaptive behaviour. Experimental evidence closely corresponds to this finding but yields contradictory results on the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment if players are...

Mullainathan, Schwartzstein, & Shleifer [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] put forward a model of coarse thinking. The essential idea behind coarse thinking is that agents put situations into categories and then apply the same model of inference to all situations in a given category. We...

This paper reports recent findings on the effects of cheap talk communication on behavior. It exemplifies how different communication channels influence decisions in various games and information environments and addresses possible consequences for the design of real-world economic environments.

This paper puts three of the most prominent specifications of ‘other-regarding’ preferences to the experimental test, namely the theories developed by Charness and Rabin, by Fehr and Schmidt, and by Andreoni and Miller. In a series of experiments based on various dictator and prisoner’s...

This paper reports 5 laboratory sessions that analyze the effects of group sizes in the voluntary contribution mechanism, when contribution level is either complementary or substitute. The theorical argument is that each production function provides different incentives for the agent along scale...

This paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of performance pay to government workers and how performance pay interacts with demand-side information. In an experiment covering 145 child day-care centres, I implement three separate treatments. First, I engineer an exogenous change in...

We develop a simple model to study the coevolution of interaction structures and action choices in prisoners' dilemma games. Agents are boundedly rational and choose both actions and interaction partners via payoff-biased imitation. The dynamics of imitation and exclusion yields polymorphic...