This paper studies experimentally how the endogeneity of sanctioning institutions affects the severity of punishment in social dilemmas. We allow individuals to vote on the introduction of third-party-administered sanctions, and compare situations in which the adoption of this institution is...

We use a public-good experiment to analyze behavior in a decentralized asymmetric punishment institution. The institution is asymmetric in the sense that players differ in the effectiveness of their punishment. At the aggregate level, we observe remarkable similarities between outcomes in...

We experimentally investigate whether the procedural history of a sanctioning institution affects cooperation in a social dilemma. Subjects inherit the institutional setting from a previous generation of subjects who either decided on the implementation of the institution democratically by...

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

We analyse two team settings in which one member in a team has stronger incentives to contribute than the others. If contributions constitute a sacrifice for the strong player, the other team members are more inclined to cooperate than if contributions are strictly dominant for the strong...

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on...

In a large economy, a first-best provison rule for a public good is robustly implementable with budget balance because no one individual alone can affect the aggregate outcome. First-best outcomes can, however, be blocked by coalitions of agents acting in concert. With a requirement of immunity...

We propose a new approach to the normative analysis of public-good provision in a large economy. Our analysis is based on a mechanism design approach that involves a requirement of coalition-proofness, as well as a requirement of robustness, so that the mechanism must not depend on specific...

We propose a new approach to the normative analysis of public-good provision. In addition to individual incentive compatibility, we impose conditions of robust implementability and coalition proofness. Under these additional conditions, participants' contributions can only depend on the level of...

We investigate power abuse of a single punisher in a public-goods-game subject to variations in punishment power and contribution transparency. We find a high amount of abuse across all conditions. More power led to more abuse over time, while transparency could only curb abuse in the high power...