Trust is indispensable to fiduciary fields (e.g., credit rating), where experts exercise wide discretion on others behalf. Can the shame from scandal sort trustworthy people out of a fiduciary field? I tested for the possibility in a charitable contribution game where subjects could be...

Trust is indispensable to fiduciary fields (e.g., credit rating), where experts exercise wide discretion on behalf of others. Can the shame from a scandal sort trustworthy people out of a fiduciary field? I tested for the possibility that a shame externality can sort in a charitable contribution...

Voluntary and compulsory (but rarely enforced) public statements of good intent are frequently observed in the real world, as for example the `Banker's oath', the 'Hippocratic oath' or the requirement of many academic journals for authors to affirm that research was carried out ethically. In...

This experiment investigates contests between groups. Each group has one strong player, with a higher valuation for the prize, and two weak players, with lower valuations. In contests where individual efforts are perfect substitutes, all players expend significantly higher efforts than predicted...

We experimentally investigate the impact of recognizing contributors on public good contributions. We vary recognizing all, highest or lowest contributors. Consistent with previous studies, recognizing all contributors significantly increases contributions relative to the baseline. Recognizing...

Governments sometimes promote rules backed by sanctions too weak to make obedience privately optimal. Factors that may help make such rules effective include the presence of informal sanctions by peers, and implementation through voting. I study the impact of non-deterrent formal sanctions on...

Studies show that identifying contributors increases contributions to public goods. In practice, viewing identifiable information is costly, which may discourage people from accessing it. We design a public goods experiment in which participants can pay to view information about identities and...

There is a substantial literature examining coordination in public goods games. We conducted an experiment to explore how varying patterns of thresholds affect the willingness of subjects to contribute to a public good. We had subjects play a multi-period game where each subject was allocated an...

An impure public good is a commodity that combines public and private characteristics in fixed proportions. Green goods such as dolphin-friendly tuna or green electricity programs provide increasings popular examples of impure goods. We design an experiment to test how the presence of impure...

Considerable experimental evidence shows that although costly peer-punishment enhances cooperation in repeated public-good games, heavy punishment in early rounds leads to average period payoffs below the non-cooperative equilibrium benchmark. In an environment where past payoffs determine...