Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: an International Comparison.

This paper studies public good provision in the laboratory using voluntary contribution mechanism, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan.EXPERIMENTS ; SOCIAL CHOICE ; PUBLIC GOODS

Voluntary Participation Game Experiments with a Non-Excludable Public Good: Is Spitefulness a Source of Cooperation?.

Economic theory predicts that it is impossible to have cooperation in finitely repeated games such as a prisoner's dilemma game without communication. In an experiment on a voluntary participation game with a non-excludable public good that is a version of a Hawk-Dove game, we obderved that evolutionary stable strategies did not appear, but cooperation emerged through a transmutation from the Hawk-Dove game to a game where a dominant strategy outcome is Pareto efficient.GAME THEORY ; EXPERIMENTS

Explicit versus implicit contracts for dividing the benefits of cooperation

Experimental evidence has accumulated highlighting the limitations of formal and explicit contracts in certain situations, and has identified environments in which informal and implicit contracts are more efficient. This paper documents the superior performance of explicit over implicit contracts in a new partnership environment in which both contracting parties must incur effort to generate a joint surplus, and one (\u201cstrong\u201d) agent controls the surplus division. In the treatment in which the strong agent makes a non-binding, cheap talk \u201cbonus\u201d offer to the weak agent, this unenforceable promise doubles the rate of joint high effort compared to a baseline with no promise. The strong agents most frequently offered to split the gains of the high effort equally, but actually delivered this amount only about one-quarter of the time. An explicit and enforceable contract offer performs substantially better, increasing the frequency of the most efficient outcome by over 200% relative to the baseline

Indirect punishment and generosity towards strangers

Many people incur costs to reward strangers who have been kind to others. Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that such "indirect rewarding" sustains cooperation between unrelated humans. Its emergence is surprising, because rewarders incur costs but receive no immediate benefits. It can prevail in the long run only if rewarders earn higher payoffs than "defectors" who ignore strangers’ kindness. We provide experimental evidence regarding the payoffs received by individuals who employ these and other strategies, such as "indirect punishment," by imposing costs on unkind strangers. We find that if unkind strangers cannot be punished, defection earns most. If they can be punished, however, then indirect rewarding earns most. Indirect punishment plays this important role, even if it gives a low payoff and is rarely implemented

Blowing the Whistle

Anti-trust, Leniency, Immunity, Amnesty, Blow the whistle, Cartels, Price competition, Bertrand model, Experiment communication, C92, D43, L13,

Immediate Disclosure or Secrecy? The Release of Information in Experimental Asset Markets

This paper reports the results of experimental asset markets designed to investigate how the public disclosure of uncertain information affects market and individual outcomes. In some markets, no information is released as trading starts, and in others, an imperfect pre-announcement is disclosed. The reliability of the pre-announcement varies across markets. Our data indicate under-reaction to a pre-announcement that is highly reliable and over-reaction to one with much lower reliability. Price volatility is higher and allocational efficiency is lower with a pre-announcement that reflects substantial uncertainty. Furthermore, when the reliability of the pre-announcement is low, traders extract a smaller proportion of the total attainable profit. Thus, in a highly uncertain environment better outcomes may result when information is withheld. These results have important policy implications regarding the disclosure of information by the Federal Reserve. In a highly uncertain environment, better outcomes may actually result with less information