Providing public goods is hard, because providers are best off free-riding. Is it even harder if one group's public good is a public bad for another group or, conversely, gives the latter a windfall profit? We experimentally study public goods provision embedded in a social context and find that...

We study the effect of voting when insiders´ public goods provision may affect passive outsiders. Without voting insiders´ contributions do not differ, regardless of whether outsiders are positively or negatively affected or even unaffected. Voting on the recommended contribution level...

We experimentally study competitive markets with socially responsible production. Our main focus is on the producers' decision whether or not to reveal the degree of social responsibility of their product. Compared to two benchmark cases where either full transparency is enforced or no...

Behavioral policy often aims at influencing behavior by mitigating biases due to, e.g., imperfect information or inattention. We study how this is affected by the simultaneous presence of multiple biases arising from different sources, through a field experiment on resource conservation in an...

Internet services are often free of charge but ask for customers' personal data in exchange for usage. We experimentally study whether the provision of information-based public goods is susceptible to restraint when contributions not only make contributors better off but also enable a...

Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972) influential explanation of the classical business firm argues that there is need for a concentrated residual claim in the hands of a central agent, to motivate the monitoring of workers. We model monitoring as a way to transform team production from a collective...

Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower or absent when the information is incomplete. We report a...

Economic and social interactions often take place in open communities but the dynamics of the community choice process and its impact on cooperation of its members are yet not well understood. We experimentally investigate community choice in social dilemmas. Participants repeatedly choose...

updated version of paper no 55