This paper shows how conflicting normative views of fair contribution rules can be used to design sequential contribution mechanisms to foster human cooperation in heterogeneous populations. Our model predicts that a sequential mechanism which solicits contributions first from wealthy actors...

This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctioning. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions in alternative punishment networks. Our results show...

The provision of public goods regularly embodies interrelated spheres of influence on multiple scales. This article examines the nature of human behavior in a multilevel social dilemma game with positive provision externalities to local and global scales. We report experimental results showing...

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies rent-seeking for pure public goods. We...

This paper examines the voluntary formation of centralized sanctioning institutions. We introduce a simple model to study institution formation as a second-order cooperation problem where voluntary contributions to a common fund serve as an instrument to finance centralized sanctioning...