One of the key issues for understanding reciprocity is how agents evaluate the kindness of an action. In this paper we investigate experimentally the hypothesis that the motivation driving an action is relevant for its perceived kindness and, as a consequence, for reciprocal behavior. In...

We experimentally demonstrate how "unpacking" provides a possible approach for mitigating the dilemma of public goods provision through private contributions. Subjects' total contributions increase when a single public good is split into two identical public goods.

We experimentally study the effects of common fate on voluntary contributions to linear public goods. In each period, earnings are assigned to subjects according to the outcome of a lottery. We manipulate the level of common fate across treatments by varying the degree of harmony in the lottery...

The main findings of the theory on the private provision of public goods under the assumptions of identical individuals and normality of both the public good and private consumption are that: 1) there exists a unique Nash equilibrium pattern of contributions in which everybody contributes the...

The main results of the traditional theory of private provision of public goods in the case of identical individuals are: 1) there exists a unique Nash equilibrium pattern of contributions in which everybody contributes the same amount (Bergstrom et al. [1986]); 2) this pattern is locally stable...

One of the key issues for understanding reciprocity is how people evaluate the kindness of an action. In this paper we argue that the motivation driving an action plays an important role for the reciprocating response to that action. We test experimentally the hypothesis that reciprocal behavior...

We study the role of social preferences and conformity in explaining herding behavior in anonymous risky environments. In an experiment similar to information cascade settings, but with no private information, we find no evidence for conformity. On the contrary, we observe a significant amount...

This paper investigates fund-raising mechanisms based on a prize as a way to overcome free riding in the private provision of public goods, under the assumptions of income heterogeneity and incomplete information about income levels. We compare experimentally the performance of a lottery, an...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for possible repetitions in the information they receive. The results indicate that network structure plays a...