Researchers have found that voting can help increase voluntary contributions to a public good—provided enforcement through a third party. Not all collective agreements, however, guarantee third-party enforcement. We design an experiment to explore whether a voting rule with and without endogenous punishment increases contributions to a public good. Our results suggest that voting by itself does...

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding. We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of “likeminded” cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of “like-minded” free ride...

Matching and Challenge Gifts to Charity: Evidence from Laboratory and Natural Field Experiments This study designs a natural field experiment linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine the effectiveness of matching gifts and challenge gifts, two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities. We find evidence that challenge gifts positiv...

We characterize equilibria of games with two properties: (i) Agents have the opportunity to adjust their strategic variable after their initial choices and before payoffs occur; but (ii) they can only add to their initial amounts. The equilibrium set consists of just the Cournot–Nash outcome, one or both Stackelberg outcomes, or a continuum of points including the Cournot– Nash outcome and one ...

We propose a simple mechanism that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. Players sequentially decide whether to contribute to a public good. They do not know their position in the sequence, but observe the actions of some predecessors. Position uncertainty provides an incentive to contribute in order to induce potential successors...

This study disentangles experimentally imitation, reinforcement, and reciprocity in repeated prisoners’ dilemmas. We compare a simple situation in which players interact only with their neighbours (local interaction) with one where players interact with all members of the population (group interaction). We observe choices under different information conditions and estimate parameters of a learn...

In this paper we study learning and cooperation in repeated prisoners’ dilemmas experiments. We compare interaction neighbourhoods of different size and structure, we observe choices under different information conditions, and we estimate parameters of a learning model. We test robustness of the estimator. We find that naive imitation, although a driving force in many models of spatial evolutio...

A family of core extensions for cooperative TU-games is introduced. These solution concepts are non-empty when applied to non-balanced games yet coincide with the core whenever the core is non-empty. The extensions suggest how an exogenous regulator can sustain a stable and efficient outcome, financing a subsidy via individual taxes. Economic and geometric properties of the solution concepts ar...

Investments in fiscal capacity—economic institutions for tax compliance—are an important feature of economic development. This paper develops a dynamic model to study the evolution of over time. We contrast a social planner’s investment path with politically feasible paths. Three types of states emerge in the long run: a commoninterest state where public resources are devoted to public goods, a...

Missing data is a major problem in empirical development economics, as it may entail efficiency losses as well as biased results. This is an issue within the literature that investigates the effect of foreign aid on welfare. Using multiple imputation techniques, we address these problems and find lower aid effectiveness than previous studies suggest. In addition, imputation allows for compariso...