This essay suggests that the evolution of human cooperation over the course of human history should be viewed as a two-layer process. A foundational layer, rooted in subsistence and ecological pressures, shaped cooperative dispositions unevenly, whereas an expansionary layer, rooted in conflict...

Der Green Startup Report 2026, herausgegeben vom Borderstep Institut für Innovation und Nachhaltigkeit, analysiert die aktuelle Entwicklung der grünen Gründungslandschaft in Deutschland und setzt die seit 2013 kontinuierlich durchgeführte wissenschaftliche Beobachtung der Szene fort. Die...

This paper studies whether alternative integration-policy framings affect cooperation in ethnically diverse groups. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with 390 adolescents in mixed classrooms in Italy. Within each class, students were randomly assigned to small groups that received either...

We analyze infinitely repeated multiplayer prisoner's dilemmas in continuous-time experiments. As the number of players changes, our design keeps the payoffs of the all-defection, all-cooperation, and unilateral- defection and -cooperation outcomes constant, thus controlling for the minimum...

This paper investigates how institutional and social trust respond to crisis situations, and to what extent different kinds of trust interact in such a context. In an online survey experiment on 4,400 representative respondents from Italy, participants are exposed to a real-world flooding...

This study presents a process narrative of how cooperatives emerge during periods of economic disruption. Cooperative organizations are pluralistic and embedded in existing local economic contexts. Yet, the role that such organizations play can be pronounced when economic disruption occurs in...

The well-known prisoner's dilemma shows why cooperation may be difficult to achieve even when cooperation would create value for all partners. In particular, material interests conflict because reciprocity cannot be enforced, while agents give priority to their material self-interest. This paper...

WORTH Partnership Project was funded by the European Commission under COSME, the EU Programme for the competitiveness of Small and Mediumsized Enterprises. WORTH was the sole European project where designers, SMEs, manufacturers, and tech providers worked together to develop innovative,...

2024 was a year that saw Europe face numerous challenges, yet make significant strides in food safety. This annual report of the Alert and Cooperation Network (ACN) is an opportune moment to take stock of the evolving landscape in food and feed safety and to explore the complexity of emerging...

As Europe's closest neighbour and strategic partner, Africa shares strong ties and mutual interests with the European Union. Their partnership is evolving into a forward-looking alliance addressing critical global challenges such as climate change and clean energy transition in support of...

Human cooperation is ubiquitous and instinctive. We are among the most cooperative species on Earth. Still, research mostly focuses on why we cooperate, instead of understanding why some of us do not do so. The public goods game can be used to map human cooperation as well as to study free...

Living organisms expend energy to sustain survival, a process which is reliant on consuming resources - termed here as the "cost of survival". In the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), a classic model of social interaction, individual payoffs depend on choices to either provide benefits to others at a...

We characterize 'Games of Altruistic Cooperation' as a class of games in which cooperation leaves the individual and the group of decision-makers worse off than defection, but favors individuals outside the group. An example is climate change mitigation. In this context, we experimentally...

Gallice and Monzón (2019) present a natural environment that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can...

Should gender composition be taken into account when forming teams? This paper examines how the output of teams completing tasks similar to those performed in many workplaces is influenced by their gender composition. Leveraging an economics bachelor course in which students are randomly paired...

January 2025, for the first time in the postwar history of Germany's national parliament, a mainstream political party (the Christian Democratic Union) relied on the support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to pass a motion. This prompted intense public debate as many Germans worried that...

Nachdem im Deutschen Bundestag Ende Januar 2025 erstmals eine politische Mehrheit mit den Stimmen der AfD zustande kam, sind viele Deutsche besorgt, dass es bald weitergehende Kooperation mit der AfD geben könnte. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht unsere Studie den Stand der Brandmauer in...

This paper studies how competition between groups affects cooperation. In the control condition, pairs of subjects play an indefinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game without external competition. In the treatment, two pairs compete against each other. No monetary rewards are tied to winning,...