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...

Considerable experimental evidence has been collected on how to solve the public-good dilemma. In a 'first generation' of experiments, this was done by presenting subjects with a pre-specified game out of a huge variety of rules. A 'second generation' of experiments introduced subjects to two...

We examine the incentive effects of funding contracts on entrepreneurial effort and on allocative efficiency. We experiment with funding contracts that differ in the structure of investor repayment and, thus, in their incentives for the provision of entrepreneurial effort. Theoretically the...

To understand cooperative behaviour in social-dilemma experiments, we need to understand the game participants play not only in monetary but in preference terms. Does a Nash-prediction based on participants' actual preferences describe their behaviour in a public-good experiment well? And if...

Crawford and Iriberri (AER, 2007) show how a level-k model can be based on salience to explain behaviour in games with distinctive action labels, taking hide-and-seek games as an example. This study presents four dierent experiments designed to measure salience. When based on any of these...

To understand cooperative behaviour in social-dilemma experiments, we need to understand the game participants play not only in monetary but in preference terms. Does a Nash-prediction based on participants’ actual preferences describe their behaviour in a public-good experiment well? And if...

In Geng, Weiss, and Woff (2011), we pointed to the possibility that a voting mechanism may create or strengthen an entitlement effect in political-power holders relative to a random-appointment mechanism. This comment documents that such an effect, if it exists, is not robust.

We examine the incentive effects of funding contracts on entrepreneurial effort decisions and allocative efficiency. We experiment with funding contracts that differ in the structure of investor repayment and, therefore, in the incentives for entrepreneurial effort provision. Theoretically the...

Models of evolutionary game theory have shown that punishment may be an adaptive behaviour in environments characterised by a social-dilemma situation. Experimental evidence closely corresponds to this finding but questions the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment if players are allowed to...