This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...

Purpose – The paper emphasises the general relevance of social norms and social associations for cooperative behaviour in less or non-social economic contexts, focusing in particular on economic laboratory experiments, and to illustrate the underlying psychological driving forces....

This paper reconsiders the valuation equilibrium concept (Jehiel and Samet, 2007) and proposes an additional regularity condition concerning the playersʼ equilibrium strategies. The condition, which requires equilibrium strategies to induce the same local behaviour at all nodes with...

In this paper, we demonstrate that the existence of sequential equilibria may depend on the players holding beliefs which are tailored to the respective equilibrium but otherwise difficult to justify. We also discuss potential remedies.

This paper proposes an extension of the valuation equilibrium concept (Jehiel and Samet, 2007), which partly endogenises the underlying grouping of actions. The effect on equilibrium predictions is illustrated in a burning money game.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of two instruments designed to defer termination in the centipede game: an insurance against termination by the opponent, and an option to offer the opponent a bonus for not terminating the game. The rational prediction in both cases is passing until...

The data reported in this paper show that in an ultimatum mini-game rejection rates of low offers are significantly reduced if participation for responders is voluntary but costly. A possible explanation based on cognitive dissonance and loss aversion is offered.

This paper provides an example showing that for finite extensive form games without perfect recall existence of Nash equilibria in behaviour strategies is not guaranteed in general.

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of how far costly transfers of economic benefits to others, often understood in economics as instances of (behavioural) altruism, can be motivated by individual group status concerns, i.e. without the common reference to...