We study the effect of environmental risk on cooperation in the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism. Our baseline is the standard setting in which the personal return from the public good is deterministic, homogeneous, and publicly known. Our experimental treatments alter this classic design by...

How is one's cognitive ability related to the way one responds to strategic uncertainty? We address this question by conducting a set of experiments in simple 2 x 2 dominance solvable coordination games. Our experiments involve two main treatments: one in which two human subjects interact, and...

Experiments based on the Beard and Beil (1994) two-player coordination game robustly show that coordination failures arise as a result of two puzzling behaviors: (i) subjects are not willing to rely on others' self-interested maximization, and (ii) self-interested maximization is not ubiquitous....