Initiated by the seminal work of Fehr and Fischbacher (Evolution and Human Behavior (2004)), a large body of research has shown that people often take punitive actions towards norm violators even when they are not directly involved in transactions. This paper shows in an experimental setting...

The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast,...

Kocher et al. (2008) find that conditional willingness to contribute to a public good is considerably stronger at a U.S. research site, Appalachian State University, than at sites in Europe and Asia. I find that the willingness at Brown University, in Rhode Island, is not significantly different...

Teams are known to behave differently from individuals, but whether they behave more cooperatively or selfishly is still unsettled in the literature. We let subjects form two-person pairs and play a finitely-repeated two-player public goods game with other pairs, and then compare the pairs’...

One of the important topics in public choice is how people’s free-riding behavior could differ by group size in collective action dilemmas. This paper experimentally studies how the strength of third party punishment in a prisoner’s dilemma could differ by the number of third parties in a...

Recent research has shown that making people’s decisions known to others may enhance cooperation in infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games with random matching. This paper experimentally studies whether people can cooperate with each other by endogenously showing their identities and...

We elicit human conditional punishment types by conducting experiments. We find that their punishment decisions to an individual are on average significantly positively proportional to other members' punishment decisions to that individual