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...

The prospect of receiving a monetary sanction for free riding has been shown to increase contributions to public goods. We ask whether the impulse to punish is unresponsive to the cost to the punisher, or whether, like other preferences, it interacts with prices to generate a conventional demand...

The fact that many people take it upon themselves to impose costly punishment on free riders helps to explain why collective action sometimes succeeds despite the prediction of received theory. But while individually imposed sanctions lead to higher contributions in public goods experiments,...

Charness et al. (2007b) have shown that group membership has a strong effect on individual decisions in strategic games when group membership is salient through payoff commonality. In this comment I show that their findings also apply to non-strategic decisions, even when no outgroup exists, and...

We present a three-player game in which a proposer makes a suggestion on how to split $10 with a passive responder. The offer is accepted or rejected depending on the strategy pro le of a neutral third-party whose payoffs are independent from his decisions. If the offer is accepted the split...

We develop a new experiment to study the emergence of welfare-reducing bilateral alliances within larger groups, and the effectiveness of institutional interventions to curtail this reciprocal alliance behaviour. In each of the 25 rounds of our experiments, a player (the 'allocator') nominates...

This paper analyzes responsibility attributions for outcomes of collective decision making processes. In particular, we ask if decision makers are blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process. We conduct an experimental voting game in which...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...

Effective communication of risks involved in the climate change discussion is crucial and despite ambitious protection policies, the possibility of irreversible consequences actually occurring can only be diminished but never ruled out completely. We present a laboratory experiment that studies...

We study a model in which agents endowed with power compete for a divisible resource by forming coalitions with other agents. The coalition with the greatest power wins the resource and divides it among its members via proportional sharing. We conduct an economic experiment using this model to...