A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

Differences in group affiliation may affect the level of cooperation in global commons situations such as programs for the conservation of resources which generate benefits that transcend state boundaries. We design a real-time, cross-cultural common pool resource (CPR) experiment purposely...

"In particular, the academic debate over the best prediction about the behavior of people that use a common-pool resource (CPR), and the recommended policy approaches to the CPR dilemma have undergone a very interesting evolution throughout the last 3 decades of the pastcentury, since the...

Economic loss to society due to dishonesty can be quite large. Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across sixteen countries. This...

Community mobilization is a key feature of community-based development projects. Community mobilization requires facilitating communication between village members and between leaders and the rest of the community. Is communication an effective device through which mobilization may foster...

This paper explores the extent to which individuals trust, reciprocate, cooperate and pool risk by using a battery of field experiments containing the trust game, the voluntary contributions mechanism and the risk pooling game; applied in six capital cities in Latin America. The results suggest...

This paper uses an experimental field approach to investigate the pro-social preferences and behavior of social services providers and the behavior of potential beneficiaries in Bogota, Colombia. Field experiments were conducted using games including a newly designed Distributive Dictator Game...

Este documento investiga hasta que punto las personas confían, reciprocan, cooperan y comparten riesgos. El estudio se llevó a cabo en seis ciudades de América Latina aplicando una serie de experimentos de campo que incluían el juego de confianza, el mecanismo de contribuciones voluntarias y...

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) has been adopted in Mali to scale-up sanitation in rural areas and accelerate progress towards the MDG target on sustainable access to basic sanitation. However, few impact evaluations of community-based sanitation interventions have been conducted so far....

The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example...