This dissertation thesis presents four studies on the relevance of individuals’ mobility for the dissemination of knowledge. They add to the literature on the economics of science and innovation as well as regional economics. Previous literature has shown researcher mobility to be an important driver of knowledge diffusion and, subsequently, the creation of new knowledge. However, different mobility types are often correlated and hard to differentiate. This thesis tries to help advance this research strand, in ...

In some important multiplayer situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision by a group with fixed membership, playing over a finite number of periods, to choose between a “tipping” game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players contribute, and a prisoners’ dilemma, the classic cooperation game. In the prisoners’ dilemma, the first best outcome is ...

Auctions have become popular as means of allocating emissions permits in the emissions trading schemes developed around the world. Mostly, only a subset of the regulated polluters participate in these auctions along with speculators, creating a market with relatively few participants and, thus, incentive for strategic bidding. I characterize the bidding behavior of the polluters and the speculators, examining the effect of the latter on the profits of the former and on the auction outcome. It turns out that in addition ...

A novelty of the new Paris Agreement is the inclusion of a process for assessment and review of countries’ nationally determined pledges and contributions. The intent is to reveal whether similar countries are making comparable pledges, whether the totality of such pledges will achieve the global goal, and whether, over the coming years, the contributions actually made by countries will equal or exceed their pledges. The intent is also to provide an opportunity for countries to express their approval, or disapproval, ...

While it is well established that individuals and groups make different economic decisions, the reasons for the behavioral differences are still not fully understood. We experimentally compare individual and group behavior in a competitive setting where cheating can be used to outperform the competitor. Our design allows us to exogenously control for the type of the decision maker, the type of the competitor, and whether the competitor is able to cheat or not. The results show that there is much more cheating in ...

Revealing the identities of contributors has been shown to increase cooperation in public goods games. In this paper we experimentally investigate whether this finding holds true when decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. We distinguish between groups in which members can discuss face-to-face to reach a decision and groups in which members communicate via computer chat. The results confirm the positive effect of identification on cooperation among individuals. For groups, however, we only find a small ...

In this paper we present a lab-in-the-field experiment with a large and diverse sample to compare charitable donations when individuals decide for themselves only and when they decide as a group representative. In contrast to the previous literature, we find that individuals make greater charitable contributions when they decide as a group representative than when they decide alone. This result demonstrates that being responsible for a group does not always lead to more selfish behavior.

Ostracism is practiced by virtually all societies around the world as a means of enforcing cooperation. In this paper, we use a public goods experiment to study whether groups choose to implement an institution that allows for the exclusion of members. We distinguish between a costless exclusion institution and a costly exclusion institution that, if chosen, reduces the endowment of all players. We also provide a comparison with an exclusion institution that is exogenously imposed upon groups. A significant share of ...

A growing experimental literature studies the endogenous choice of institutions to solve cooperation problems arising in prisoners’ dilemmas, public goods games, and common pool resource games. Participants in these experiments have the opportunity to influence the rules of the game before they play the game. In this paper, we review the experimental literature of the last 20 years on the choice of institutions and describe what has been learned about the quality and the determinants of institutional choice. Cooperative ...