International climate negotiations have so far failed to produce ambitious climate cooperation. We combine laboratory experiments with simulations to investigate the performance of two negotiation design features to address this failure: The Paris Agreement's ratchet-up mechanism, which requires...

Social fragmentation has been identified as a potential cause for the under-provision of public goods in developing nations, as well as in urban communities in developed countries such as the U.S. We study the effect of social fragmentation on public good provision using laboratory experiments....

A key solution for public good provision is the voluntary formation of institutions that commit players to cooperate. Such institutions generate inequality if some players decide not to participate but cannot be excluded from cooperation benefits. Prior research with small groups emphasizes the...

Teams are known to be more cognitively able, and accordingly behave more efficiently, than individuals. This paper provides the first experimental evidence of the so-called “individual-team discontinuity effect” in an institutional setting. In a finitely repeated public goods game where...

Can formal institutions shape prosocial behavior and lead to the spillover effect of cooperation? To explore this question, we experimentally test the spillover- based theory in a novel context. We measured the spillover effect on cooperation in the same domain measured by the repeated anonymous...

There is ample evidence for a "democracy premium". Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared to a top-down approach. This has been observed using field data and laboratory experiments. We present evidence from Chinese students and workers who...

A growing experimental literature studies the endogenous choice of institutions to solve cooperation problems arising in prisoners' dilemmas, public goods games, and common pool resource games. Participants in these experiments have the opportunity to influence the rules of the game before they...

Recent experimental studies question whether societies can selfgovern social dilemmas with the help of decentralized punishment opportunities. One important challenge for the mechanism is imperfect information about cooperative behavior. It has been shown that imperfect information increases...

We present results from a repeated public goods experiment where subjects choose by vote one of two sanctioning schemes: peer-to-peer (informal) or centralized (formal). We introduce, in some treatments, a moderate amount of noise (a 10 percent probability that a contribution is reported...

We experimentally investigate whether the procedural history of a sanctioning institution affects cooperation in a social dilemma. Subjects inherit the institutional setting from a previous generation of subjects who either decided on the implementation of the institution democratically by...