Two books edited by members of the MacArthur Norms and Preferences Network (an interdisciplinary group, mainly anthropologists and economists) are reviewed here. These books in large part reflect a renewed interest in group selectionthat has occurred among these researchers: they promote the...

This Thesis contains three essays on the economic behavior of individuals. The first essay, co-authored with Andreas Blume and Douglas DeJong is an experimental investigation into the contribution of cognition in a strategic setting where the goal is to coordinate by choosing different courses...

Die Arbeit basiert auf fünf Aufsätzen. In diesen wird über vier Experimentserien berichtet, die das individuelle Entscheidungsverhalten von Versuchspersonen in ähnlichen, aber verschieden komplexen Situationen erheben. Es wird ein experimentelles Szenario vorgestellt, mit dessen Hilfe...

This thesis proposes and evaluates the tax affinity hypothesis claiming that people derive utility from paying tax. Slutsky-like equations are derived for the unique three-good utility maximization problem with leisure as the only choice variable. There is evidence for the tax affinity...

"Planning efforts in the SA Murray Darling Basin (SAMDB) have focused on the revegetation of degraded, privately held agricultural land, using locally native species, to meet prescribed resource condition targets of increased biodiversity, carbon sequestration, salinity and wind erosion...

"Policy design is largely informed by the traditional economic viewpoint that humans behave rationally in the pursuit of their own economic welfare, with little consideration of other regarding behavior or reciprocal altruism. New paradigms of economic behavior theory are emerging that build an...

"A common-pool resource (CPR) is defined as any resource in which exclusion is difficult and consumption of resource units is rival. Examples of CPRs include groundwater basins, fisheries, forests, grazing ranges, and irrigation systems in which property rights--or the ability to uphold such...

"In this study, individual level behavior is investigated in the context of computer assisted voluntary contribution mechanism public good (VCM) provision experiments and common pool resource (CPR) appropriation experiments. Previous studies of these environments have concentrated on aggregate...

"We develop an evolutionary game theory model for a limited access common pool resource. With full disclosure of individual extraction decisions and payoffs we conjecture that subjects will imitate the most successful players’ strategy as long as their payoffs increase. We derive a stable...

Published as:"The Nature of Common-Pool Resource Problems," Rationality and Society 2(3), July 1990, 335-358."A large, multidisciplinary literature focuses on the problems occurring when multiple individuals concurrently use common-pool resources such as fisheries, grazing areas, airsheds, oil...