Full agreement and the provision of threshold public goods

We report threshold public good experiments in which group members not only need to be individually willing to contribute enough to provide the public good but also have to agree with each other on what every group members should contribute. We find strong support to the hypothesis that full agreement increases successful provision, although it takes a few repetitions before group members can successfully coordinate. This is consistent with our theoretical results that full agreement works because it increases criticality of each individual decision. The existence of a focal point makes it possible for the group members to successfully coordinate.Public good, threshold, full agreement, focal point, experiment, coordination

Threshold public good games and impulse balance theory

We propose and develop a model of behavior in threshold public good games. The model draws on learning direction theory and impulse balance theory. We find good support for the model and demonstrate that it can explain the success rates observed in threshold public good experiments. The model is applied in a variety of dierent settings : we compare games with a full refund to those with no refund, consider changes in relative endowment, and consider changes in the step return and net reward.Public good, threshold, learning direction theory, impulse balance theory, counterfactual thinking

Does the endowment of contributors make a difference in threshold public games?

We investigate experimentally whether the endowment of potential contributors changes the success rate of providing threshold public goods. We find a U shaped relationship in which the success rate is relatively high when the endowment is either relatively small or large. We also find an inverted U shaped relationship in terms of the variance of contributions. This suggests that people find it hardest to coordinate and provide threshold public goods when endowments are of intermediate size. By this we mean that the endowment is small enough that people do need to contribute relatively a lot to fund the good, but is also large enough that no one person is critical in providing the good. Coordinating is difficult in this case because there is an incentive to free ride and the possibility to do so creating a conflict of interest

Studying deception without deceiving participants: An experiment of deception experiments

Banning deception in economic experiments does not exclude experiments with participants in the role of experimenters who can gain by deceiving those in the role of participants. We compare treatments with and without possible deception by experimenter-participants to test whether deception aects behaviour of participant-participants in a dictator experiment and whether participants in the role of experimenters engage in deception. We find no dierence in behaviour of participant-participants between the treatments whereas most participants in the role of experimenters engage in deception

Accuracy of proposers' beliefs in an allocation-type game

In the context of an allocation game, this paper analyses the proposer´s reported beliefs about the responder´s willingness to accept (or reject) the proposed split of the pie. The proposer´s beliefs are elicited via a quadratic scoring rule. An econometric model of the proposer´s beliefs is estimated. The estimated proposer´s beliefs are then compared with the actual responder´s choices. As a result of this comparison, we observe that the proposer tends to underestimate the empirical acceptance probability, especially when the slice of the pie allocated to the proposer is large

Concession bargaining: An experimental comparison of protocols and time horizons

Concessions try to avoid conflict in bargaining and can finally lead to an agreement. Although they usually are seen as unfolding in time, concessions can also be studied in normal form or by conditioning only on failure of earlier agreement attempts. We experimentally compare three protocols of concession bargaining, the normal form or static one, the one where concessions only condition on earlier failures and the truly dynamic one. In spite of their considerable differences in conditioning, the three protocols do not differ in agreement ratio, efficiency and inequality of agreements. There are, however, effects of the maximal number of trials to reach an agreement by concession making and of protocol on when to abstain from conceding

How do we choose whom to trust? The effect of social networks on trust

Our social lives are governed by trust. But how do we choose whom to trust? In this work, based on a laboratory experiment, we explore whether building relationships in a social network increases individuals' level of trust. We find that social interactions direct trust, but their impulse is not sufficiently strong to result beneficial

Enhancement of TiO2 NPs Activity by Fe3O4 Nano-Seeds for Removal of Organic Pollutants in Water

The enhancement of the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs), synthesized in the presence of a very small amount of magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles, is here presented and discussed. From X-ray diffraction (XRD) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analyses, the crystallinity of TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) seems to be affected by Fe3O4, acting as nano-seeds to improve the tetragonal TiO2 anatase structure with respect to the amorphous one. Photocatalytic activity data, i.e., the degradation of methylene blue and the Ofloxacin fluoroquinolone emerging pollutant, give evidence that the increased crystalline structure of the NPs, even if correlated to a reduced surface to mass ratio (with respect to commercial TiO2 NPs), enhances the performance of this type of catalyst. The achievement of a relatively well-defined crystal structure at low temperatures (Tmax = 150 \u25e6C), preventing the sintering of the TiO2 NPs and, thus, preserving the high density of active sites, seems to be the keystone to understand the obtained results