Under a great variety of legally relevant circumstances, people have to decide whether or not to cooperate, when they face an incentive to defect. The law sometimes provides people with sanctioning mechanisms to enforce pro-social behavior. Experimental evidence on voluntary public good...

Under a great variety of legally relevant circumstances, people have to decide whether or not to cooperate, when they face an incentive to defect. The law sometimes provides people with sanctioning mechanisms to enforce pro-social behavior. Experimental evidence on voluntary public good...

We study information conditions under which individuals are willing to delegate their sanctioning power to a central authority. We design a public goods game in which players can move between institutional environments, and we vary the observability of others' contributions. We find that the...

The civil war in Syria has been raging since 2011. We ask whether civil war experience affects voluntary cooperation and its coordination by means of peer punishment. To answer that question, we ran experiments with Syrians and Jordanians, and use a victimization index to measure the individual...

An unprecedented number of refugees from Syria has sought refuge in both the Middle East and Europe since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011. We analyze the level of altruism and risk-seeking among Syrian civil war victims in Jordan. We find systematic variations in their revealed...

We report the results of an experiment on norm violation, specifically lying, in a repeatedly played mind game with Syrian refugees in Jordan and in Germany. We compare their behavior with Jordanians, Germans, and Syrians who still live in Syria. The average number of lies is amazingly similar -...

We analyze possible links between both trust and trustworthiness among Syrian refugees in Germany in relation to the refugees' involvement in two different forms of social networking (forming bonding ties with other refugees vs. forming bridging ties between refugees and Germans). We implement...

Does the experience of civil war promote in-group bias among survivors? We try to answer this question by analyzing cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game among Syrian refugees in two host countries, Germany and Jordan. We use a between-subjects analysis to test our in-group cooperation...

We study information conditions under which individuals are willing to delegate their sanctioning power to a central authority. We design a public goods game in which players can move between institutional environments, and we vary the observability of others' contributions. We find that the...