We examine the strategies interwar working-class British households used to “smooth” consumption over time and guard against negative contingencies such as illness, unemployment, and death. Newly discovered returns from the U.K. Ministry of Labour's 1937/38 Household Expenditure Survey are...

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...

Many resource allocation contests have the property that individuals undertake costly actions to appropriate a potentially divisible resource. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three resource allocation contests which are isomorphic under riskneutrality. The...

Many resource allocation contests have the property that individuals undertake costly actions to appropriate a potentially divisible resource. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three resource allocation contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality. The...

A growing body of field and experimental literature provides considerable evidence that individuals may adopt self-governing institutions that enable conflict resolution. This paper examines this issue by exploring the role of heterogeneity in individuals' production capabilities and past...

The most important single observation from this research is the similarity between our wide range of results and the multitude of seemingly divergent conclusions about free riding from previous experimental results. Even when defined in the restrictive manner of this paper, free riding is...

The recent industrial action taken by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has given the issue of academic pay high prominence in the UK press. There appears to be a remarkable consensus that higher education academic salaries are too low, relative to other groups of workers in the UK,...