In a repeated public goods setting, we explore whether individuals, acting unilaterally, will provide an effective sanctioning institution. Subjects first choose unilaterally whether they will participate in a sanctioning stage that follows a contribution stage. Only those who gave themselves...

We devise a new experimental game by nesting a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. With it, we study tensions between egalitarianism, equity concerns, self-interest, and the need for incentives. In a 2x2 design, subjects either vote on or exogenously...

This paper examines how third-party surveillance influences preferences over distributional outcomes. In addition, we examine what motivates people to invest economic resources to monitor decision-making processes. Our results show that a large majority of individuals is willing to pay for a...

We investigate the effects of the availability of resources that can be expended in conflict on conflict intensity. We run a between-subjects Tullock contest in which we vary the contest budget from Low to Medium to High, while keeping the Nash equilibrium bid the same. We find an 'inverted...

We investigate the effects of Partner and Stranger matching in contest experiments and find no difference in the level or distribution of bids across matching protocols. However, demographic and individual strategy effects are different with different matching. Hence, unless one is interested in...

An important branch of economic research on emotions has used power-to-take game experiments to study the impact of negative emotions, such as anger, irritation and contempt, on the decision to punish. We investigate experimentally to what extent the findings of this literature are driven by the...

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a...

Social preferences have been shown to be an important determinant of economic decision making for many adults. We present a largescale experiment with 883 children and adolescents, aged eight to seventeen years. Participants make decisions in eight simple, oneshot allocation tasks, allowing us...

This experimental study investigates the behaviour of banks in a large value payment system. More specifically, we look at 1) the reactions of banks to disruptions in the payment system, 2) the way in which the history of disruptions affects the behaviour of banks (path dependency) and 3) the...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk that is independent of buyers' private values or their signals regarding common value components. Eso and White (2004) showed theoretically that ex-post risk leads to precautionary bidding for DARA bidders: Agents reduce...