In this paper, I discuss dual collective action problems in which a resource pool has simultaneous common pool and public good aspects in its usage, such as hunting (consumption) and conservation of wildlife. I then implement laboratory experiments to evaluate how spillovers between the two related uses of nature affect the consumption and conservation habits of stakeholders. The Nash predictions suggest that even the most selfish of profit-maximizing agents have an incentive to provide equally towards resource consumption and conservation when resource spillovers are present. Results from laboratory experiments are consistent with this hypothesis. As a policy intervention, I introduced and later revoked a common pool licensing policy based on U.S. hunting and fishing licensing. Under the same theoretical framework, removing a common pool licensing policy would increase welfare for all resource stakeholders. Contrary to this, experimental evidence indicates no overall change in welfare.

This paper compares contributions to an experimental public good across the United States and Czech Republic, using a design that allows us to distinguish between altruism and decision error. Czech subjects contribute significantly more than American subjects, and further analysis reveals that this result cannot be attributed to the confounding effects of gender or decision error. Instead, preferences for altruism appear to differ across groups: Czechs are more altruistic than Americans and men are more altruistic than women.

This paper reports on the use of carrot (positive) and stick (negative) incentives as methods of increasing effort among members of work teams. We study teams of four members in a laboratory environment in which giving effort towards the team goal is simulated by eliciting voluntary contributions towards the provision of a public good. We test the efficiency-improving properties of four distinct environments: monetary prizes given to high contributors versus monetary fines assessed to low contributors, where high/low contributor is defined first in terms of absolute contributions and then in terms of contributions relative to abilities—which we call handicapping. Our results show that both carrot and stick can increase efficiency (i.e., contributions) levels by 10-28%. We find that handicapped incentives promise the highest efficiency levels, and when handicapping is not used penalties may be more effective than prizes. The implications for work teams and suggestions for practical implementation are discussed.

We explore the effect of fixed versus dynamic group membership on public good provision. In a novel experimental design, we modify the traditional voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) by periodically replacing old members of a group with new members over time. Under this dynamic, overlapping generations matching protocol we find that average contributions experience significantly less decay over time relative to a traditional VCM environment with fixed group membership and a common termination date. These findings suggest that the traditional pattern of contribution and decay seen in many public goods experiments may not accurately reflect behavior in groups with changing membership, as is the case in many real-world environments.

A key question about human societies is how social norms of cooperation are enforced. Subjects who violate norms are often targeted by their peers for punishment. In an experiment with small teams we examine whether subjects treat punishment itself as a second-order public good. Results do not support this view and rather suggest a hard-wired taste for punishment; subjects are engaged in a cooperative task but ignore the public good characteristics of punishment.

We investigate the effects of centrality on cooperation in groups. Players with centrality keep a group together by having a pivotal position in a network. In some of our experimental treatments, players can vote to exclude others and prevent them from further participation in the group. We find that, in the presence of exclusion, central players contribute significantly less than others, and that this is tolerated by those others. Because of this tolerance, groups with centrality manage to maintain high levels of cooperation.

A vast amount of empirical and theoretical research on public good games indicates that the threat of punishment can curb free-riding in human groups engaged in joint enterprises. Since punishment is often costly, however, this raises an issue of second-order free-riding: indeed, the sanctioning system itself is a common good which can be exploited. Most investigations, so far, considered peer punishment: players could impose fines on those who exploited them, at a cost to themselves. Only a minority considered so-called pool punishment. In this scenario, players contribute to a punishment pool before engaging in the joint enterprise, and without knowing who the free-riders will be. Theoretical investigations (Sigmund et al., Nature 466:861–863, 2010) have shown that peer punishment is more efficient, but pool punishment more stable. Social learning, i.e., the preferential imitation of successful strategies, should lead to pool punishment if sanctions are also imposed on second-order free-riders, but to peer punishment if they are not. Here we describe an economic experiment (the Mutual Aid game) which tests this prediction. We find that pool punishment only emerges if second-order free riders are punished, but that peer punishment is more stable than expected. Basically, our experiment shows that social learning can lead to a spontaneously emerging social contract, based on a sanctioning institution to overcome the free rider problem.

We investigate the endogenous formation of sanctioning institutions supposed to improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. Our paper parallels Markussen et al. (Rev Econ Stud 81:301–324, 2014) in that our experimental subjects vote over formal versus informal sanctions, but it goes beyond that paper by endogenizing the formal sanction scheme. We find that self-determined formal sanctions schemes are popular and efficient when they carry no up-front cost, but as in Markussen et al. informal sanctions are more popular and efficient than formal sanctions when adopting the latter entails such a cost. Practice improves the performance of sanction schemes: they become more targeted and deterrent with learning. Voters’ characteristics, including their tendency to engage in perverse informal sanctioning, help to predict individual voting.

Some peer punishment technologies may bias experimental results in unwanted ways. A critical parameter to consider in the design is the “fine-to-fee” ratio, which measures the income reduction for the targeted subject relative to the cost for the subject who requested the punishment. We show that a punishment technology commonly used in experiments embeds a variable fine-to-fee ratio and show that it could confound the empirical findings about why, whom, and how much subjects punish.

Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory “endowments” they make less self-interested choices than when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we decompose this into two common artifacts of the laboratory: the intangibility of money (or experimental currency units) promised on a computer screen relative to cash in hand, and the distinct treatment of random “windfall” gains relative to earned money. While both effects are found to be significant in non-parametric tests, the former effect, which has been neglected in previous studies, has a stronger impact on total donations, while the latter effect has a greater impact on the probability of donating. These results have clear implications for experimental design, and also suggest that the availability of more abstract payment methods may increase other-regarding behavior in the field.

This dissertation focuses on the political economy of fisheries governance. The study develops a formal model of fisheries governance by combining the features of the common pool fishery and the political institution of lobbying; designs a laboratory fishery governance institution and conducts economic experiments to test the hypotheses derived from the formal model. Specifically, the study analyzes how fishing firms invest in efforts to influence fishery regulation and management through voluntary contribution lobbying. The study also analyses and compares contribution and effort behavior in the lobbying and the CPR using data from economic experiments.

The results indicate that lobbying to change suboptimal fishery regulations was significantly below the subgame perfect equilibrium prediction and contributions to raise the cap were significantly different than contributions to lower the cap toward the social optimum. Study results show that subjects successfully lobbied to raise inefficiently low fishing quotas, but were unable to lobby to reduce inefficiently high fishing quotas. Detailed analysis of subjects’ contribution and effort behavior suggest that despite the interesting benefit-cost duality between pure public goods and CPRs, the pattern of cooperative behavior in these two social dilemma situations was different and the level of cooperation in the voluntary contribution lobbying experiment was lower than those reported in other public goods experiments.

To provide external validity to these experimental findings, the study further analyzes and compares lobbying expenditures in the fishery sector with those in other natural resource industries using field data from the United States. A comparison of actual lobbying expenditures as percentage of valued added shows that lobbying effort in the U.S fishery sector is not significantly different than those in other natural resource industries such as mining and electric utility industries, but the pattern of lobbying is different. Whereas fishing firms lobby through associations or pressure groups, Arms in other natural resource industries lobby unilaterally. This observation suggests that differences in industrial structure and incentives influence the pattern of lobbying and the lobbying behavior of firms across industries.

The theoretical predictions derived from the formal model of fisheries governance are consistent with our experimental findings and with the field data on lobbying in the US fisheries sector. These findings suggest that heterogeneity drives rent-seeking activities in the US fisheries sector and that fishing firms attempt to circumvent political collective action problems by forming and lobbying through associations of stakeholders with relatively homogenous policy preferences.

Leadership mechanisms provide a potential means to mitigate social dilemmas, but empirical evidence on the success of such mechanisms is mixed. In this paper, we explore the institutional frame as a relevant factor for the effectiveness of leadership. We compare subjects’ behavior in public-goods experiments that are either framed positively (give-some game) or negatively (take-some game). We observe that leader and follower decisions are sensitive to the institutional frame. Leaders contribute less in the take-some game, and the correlation between leaders’ and followers’ contribution is weaker in the take-some game. Additionally, using a strategy method to elicit followers’ reactions at the individual level, we find evidence for the malleability of followers’ revealed cooperation types. Taken together, the leadership institution is found to be less efficient in the take- than in the give-frame, both in games that are played only once and repeatedly.

Objective: To use meta-analysis techniques to assess the impact of various factors on the extent of cooperation in standard linear public goods experiments using the voluntary contributions mechanism.

Data Sources: Potentially relevant experiments were identified through searches of EconLit, the Internet Documents in Economics Access Service (IDEAS), and a survey article.

Review Methods: A total of 349 potentially relevant studies were identified. Of these, 27 (representing a total of 711 groups of participants) met the inclusion criteria. Data were abstracted from these studies using a standardized protocol. Results were analyzed using weighted ordinary least squares. Average group efficiency was the dependent variable.

Results: The marginal per capita return, communication, constant group composition over the session (“partners”), positive framing, and the use of children as subjects had a positive and significant effect (p < 0.05) on the average level of contribution to the public good. Heterogeneous endowments to subjects, experienced participants, and soliciting subjects’ beliefs regarding other participants’ behaviour prior to the start of the session/period had a negative and significant effect. A number of other factors were not identified as significant.

Conclusion: The meta-analysis results parallel several key findings from previous literature reviews. In addition, they offer parameter estimates and an analysis of significance based on the totality of the available research evidence. More consistent reporting of the results of experiments would greatly improve the ability to conduct this type of research.

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making “others’ behaviour” a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional Information Lottery, which offers all the benefits of deception without actually deceiving anyone. The design should be suitable for most economics experiments, and works by a modification of an already standard device, the Random Lottery incentive system. The deceptive scenarios of designs which use deceit are replaced with fictitious scenarios, each of which, from a subject's viewpoint, has a chance of being true. The design is implemented in a sequential play public good experiment prompted by Weimann's (1994) result, from a deceptive design, that subjects are more sensitive to freeriding than cooperation on the part of others. The experiment provides similar results to Weimann's, in that subjects are at least as cooperative when uninformed about others’ behaviour as they are if reacting to high contributions. No deception is used and the data cohere well both internally and with other public goods experiments. In addition, simultaneous play is found to be more efficient than sequential play, and subjects contribute less at the end of a sequence than at the start. The results suggest pronounced elements of overconfidence, egoism and (biased) reciprocity in behaviour, which may explain decay in contributions in repeated play designs. The experiment shows there is a workable alternative to deception.

This paper studies how subjects in a three-person sequential step-level public good game learn to punish free riders more over time. Our current work makes several additions to the literature on other regarding behavior. First, our experiment provides evidence that subjects care about the actions that lead to an outcome as well as the outcome itself, replicating the results of A. Falk, E. Fehr and U. Fischbacher (Economic Inquiry, in press), J. Brandts and C. Sola (Games and Economic Behavior, 36(2), 138-157, 2001.) and J.H. Kagel and K. Wolfe (Working paper, Ohio State University, 1999). Second, our experiment provides one of the first tests of the newer theories of reciprocity by A. Falk and U. Fischbacher (Working paper, University of Zurich, 2000) and G. Charness and M. Rabin (Quarterly Journal of Economics, in press) that take a psychological games approach. We find that these theories fail to explain the experimental data. Finally, we examine the mechanism by which subjects learn to punish free-riding more ofter over time.

The work undertook is located between Public Economic Theory and Experimental Economics. The object of the thesis consists in analysing the aggregate behavior and the individual heterogeneity in a voluntary contribution game. The thesis defended here is that overcontribution in comparison to the Nash equilibrium of the game, can not be explained neither by judgement errors, nor by the information on the individual behaviour of the members in a one given group. The level of contribution observed remains nevertheless inferior to the one simulated using the E.W.A. learning model.

The dissertation is composed of three parts and six chapters. The first chapter expresses the various theoretical mechanisms of production of a public good, while the second one presents an overview of the experimental literature using voluntary contribution mechanisms.

The second part carries on the introduction of an interior solution in a public good game in order to distinguish an explanation of overcontribution in terms of mistakes or strategies. While chapter three presents the most important works in literature that use an interior solution, the fourth chapter constitutes a personal contribution consisting in an experiment with an interior optimum. Our main result is that individuals contribute a constant part of their social optimum and that overcontribution is not explained by error. We test then the simple learning model R.L. using the observed data on the aggregate level. This model predicts well the observed behaviour.

The third part is composed of two experiments where the environment of players is modified. We introduce in chapter five promises as cheap talk and find that they increase contributions at the aggregate level. In chapter six, various conditions of information on individual contributions are tested. The parameter tested is the level of information on “neighbours” contributions given to players. One of the treatments presents full information about individual contributions of the members of the group, while this information is incomplete in the other treatments. Our results show that information has no effect on the level of contribution. We simulate then the EWA learning model both at the aggregate and the individual levels and compare the simulated data to the experimental one. These simulations predict a level of contribution that is higher that the one observed in the experiment.

We experimentally test different rule-based contribution mechanisms in a repeated 4-player public goods game with endowment heterogeneity and compare them to a VCM, distinguishing between a random and an effort-based allocation of endowments. We find that endowment heterogeneities limit the efficiency gains from these rule-based contribution schemes under random allocation. Under effort-based allocations, substantial efficiency gains relative to a VCM occur. These are largely driven by significant reductions of contributions in VCM, while the rule-based mechanisms generate stable efficiency levels, even though falling short in realizing the maximal efficiency gains. Our results indicate that the procedure of endowment allocation impacts the perception of what constitutes a fair burden sharing.

The “collective action problem” describes situations where each person in a group can individually profit more by withholding contributions to group goals. However, if all act in their material self-interest no public good is produced and all are worse off. I present a new solution to the collective action problem based on status. I argue that contributions to collective action increase an individual's status in the group because contributions create perceptions of high group motivation, defined as the relative value an individual places on group versus individual welfare. Individuals are predicted to receive a variety of social and material benefits for their contributions to the group. These rewards can help explain why individuals contribute to collective action.

Four laboratory studies tested the theory. In Study 1, following interaction in a 6- person public goods game, participants reported viewing higher contributors as more group motivated and higher status. Higher contributors also wielded more interpersonal influence in task interactions with participants. Participants also cooperated with higher contributors more, and allocated greater altruism to them in a Dictator game. Study 2 addressed an exchange-theoretic alternative explanation for the findings of Study 1, showing that observers of collective action who did not benefit from higher contributors’ contributions to the public good, nonetheless rated them as higher status, cooperated with them more, and gave them greater altruistic gifts. These results show that collective action contributors can earn social and material benefits even outside the group.

Study 3 more directly tested the mediating role of group motivation. Contributors who sacrificed a greater proportion of resources for the collective action were rated as more group motivated and higher status than a moderate proportional contributor, even though the amounts they contributed were the same. These findings support the theory, and underscore the significance of self-sacrifice in the acquisition of status in collective action.

Study 4 investigated the effects of status rewards on contributors’ behavior towards and perceptions of the group. Participants who received positive status feedback for their contributions subsequently contributed more than those who did not. Rewarded participants also identified more with the group and saw it as having greater solidarity and cohesion. I conclude by discussing theoretical implications and future research.

Favor trading is common. We do something nice for someone and they do something nice in return. Several motives might underlie such behavior, including altruism, strategic motives, and direct or indirect positive reciprocity. It is not yet well-understood how these fit together to affect behavior, how they interact in various institutional structures, and how they play out over time. We use a laboratory experiment to study the elements and dynamics of favor trading in a particular setting: the private provision of a public good. In our experiment, giving subjects the ability to practice targeted reciprocity by making a simple, low-cost change in information provision increases contributions to the public good by 14 %. Subjects reward group members who have previously been generous to them and withhold rewards from ungenerous group members. Strategic concerns cannot explain all of this behavior, and it must be at least partly due to direct reciprocity. When someone cannot directly benefit from favor trading, he gives much less to the public good. People thus excluded from the “circle of reciprocity” provide a clean and strict test of indirect reciprocity. Contrary to previous studies in the literature, we do not observe indirect reciprocity.

Many social dilemmas involve deciding among alternative public goods, and include cases where part of the population may dislike a particular option. In such cases, an agent may want to spend resources to oppose or reduce the provision of the option they don’t like. We propose the generalized voluntary contributions mechanism (GVCM), which allows allocating resources to increase or decrease the level of public good. Our main treatment variables include two versions of the GVCM (uncensored, or censored at positive provision). We study performance of GVCM for various compositions of the polarized preferences. We find that uncensoring the mechanism does not impose net efficiency costs and leads to more diversity in the provision of the public good. The nature of efficiency loss is more complex compared to standard VCM and is not driven by free riding.