Social norms of cooperation are studied under several forms of communication. In an experiment, strangers could make public statements before playing a prisoner’s dilemma. The interaction was repeated indefinitely, which generated multiple equilibria. Communication could be used as a tool to...

We study individual behavior of students and workers in an experiment where they repeatedly faced with the same cooperative task. The data show that clerical workers differ from college students in overall cooperation rates, strategies adopted, and use of punishment opportunities. Students...

What institutions can sustain cooperation in groups of strangers? Here we study the role of monetary systems. In an experiment, subjects sometimes needed help and sometimes could incur a cost to help an anonymous counterpart. In the absence of money, the intertemporal exchange of help, which...

We develop a general procedure to construct pairwise meeting processes characterized by two features. First, in each period the process maximizes the number of matches in the population. Second, over time agents meet everybody else exactly once. We call this type of meetings “absolute...

One of the main challenges for monetary economics is to explain the use of assets that are dominated in rate-of-return as media of exchange.We use experimental methods to study howa fiat money might come to be used in transactions when an identically marketable, dividend-bearing asset, a consol,...

Under what conditions can cooperation be sustained in a network of strangers? Here we study the role of institutions and uncover a new behavioral foundation for the use of monetary systems.In an experiment, anonymous subjects could cooperate or defect in bilateral random encounters. This...