Outputs (41)

Incentives crowd out voluntary cooperation: evidence from gift-exchange experiments (2025)
Journal Article
Gächter, S., Kaiser, E., & Königstein, M. (2025). Incentives crowd out voluntary cooperation: evidence from gift-exchange experiments. Experimental Economics, 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1017/eec.2024.14

Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation coexist in many economic relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentives can lead to crowding out of vo... Read More about Incentives crowd out voluntary cooperation: evidence from gift-exchange experiments.

The contractual dispute resolution game: Real-effort experiments on contract negotiation and arbitration (2025)
Journal Article
Corgnet, B., Gächter, S., & Hernán-González, R. (2025). The contractual dispute resolution game: Real-effort experiments on contract negotiation and arbitration. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 231, Article 106902. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106902

In many contractual arrangements where product or service delivery occurs sometime after contracts have been concluded, conditions may change, leading to disputes that need to be resolved often by a third party (arbitrator/mediator). In this paper we... Read More about The contractual dispute resolution game: Real-effort experiments on contract negotiation and arbitration.

Wherefore art thou competitors? How situational affordances help differentiate among prosociality, individualism, and competition (2024)
Journal Article
Liu, Y., Stivers, A. W., Murphy, R. O., Van Doesum, N. J., Joireman, J., Gallucci, M., Aharonov-Majar, E., Athenstaedt, U., Bai, L., Böhm, R., Buchan, N. R., Chen, X.-P., Dumont, K. B., Engelmann, J. B., Eriksson, K., Euh, H., Fiedler, S., Friesen, J., Gächter, S., Garcia, C., …Van Lange, P. A. M. (2024). Wherefore art thou competitors? How situational affordances help differentiate among prosociality, individualism, and competition. European Journal of Personality, https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070241298850

The Triple Dominance Measure (choosing between prosocial, individualistic, and competitive options) and the Slider Measure (“sliding” between various orientations, for example, from individualistic to prosocial) are two widely used techniques to meas... Read More about Wherefore art thou competitors? How situational affordances help differentiate among prosociality, individualism, and competition.

Social preferences and the variability of conditional cooperation (2024)
Journal Article
Baader, M., Gächter, S., Lee, K., & Sefton, M. (2024). Social preferences and the variability of conditional cooperation. Economic Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-024-01617-1

We experimentally examine how incentives affect conditional cooperation (i.e., cooperating in response to cooperation and defecting in response to defection) in social dilemmas. In our first study, subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma ga... Read More about Social preferences and the variability of conditional cooperation.

Social norms: Enforcement, breakdown & polarization (2024)
Journal Article
Balafoutas, L., Dimant, E., Gächter, S., & Krupka, E. (2024). Social norms: Enforcement, breakdown & polarization. European Economic Review, 170, Article 104885. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104885

The collection of scientific contributions in this special issue explores the role of social norms in guiding collective behavior and the complexities of enforcing these norms in polarized contexts. It examines how norms, while fostering social cohes... Read More about Social norms: Enforcement, breakdown & polarization.

How to activate threat perceptions in behavior research: A simple technique for inducing health and resource scarcity threats (2024)
Journal Article
Isler, O., Yilmaz, O., Maule, A. J., & Gächter, S. (2024). How to activate threat perceptions in behavior research: A simple technique for inducing health and resource scarcity threats. Behavior Research Methods, 56, 8379-8395. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02481-6

Understanding our cognitive and behavioral reactions to large-scale collective problems involving health and resource scarcity threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, helps us be better prepared for future collective threats. However, existing studie... Read More about How to activate threat perceptions in behavior research: A simple technique for inducing health and resource scarcity threats.

The role of payoff parameters for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma (2024)
Journal Article
Gächter, S., Lee, K., Sefton, M., & Weber, T. O. (2024). The role of payoff parameters for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. European Economic Review, 166, Article 104753. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104753

The Prisoner's Dilemma is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how its material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. We investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on cooperation in... Read More about The role of payoff parameters for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma.

The behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey (2023)
Journal Article
Weber, T. O., Schulz, J. F., Beranek, B., Lambarraa-Lehnhardt, F., & Gächter, S. (2023). The behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 215, 134-152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.09.006

We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. Using one-shot public goods experiments in four comparable subject pools from the US and the UK (two si... Read More about The behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey.

Who discriminates? Evidence from a trust game experiment across three societies (2023)
Journal Article
Chuah, S.-H., Gächter, S., Hoffmann, R., & Tan, J. H. W. (2023). Who discriminates? Evidence from a trust game experiment across three societies. Journal of Economic Psychology, 97, Article 102630. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2023.102630

What personal characteristics are associated with the extent to which individuals discriminate against particular groups? We use an incentive-compatible measure of an individual's tendency to discriminate on others’ different social identities that t... Read More about Who discriminates? Evidence from a trust game experiment across three societies.

Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production (2023)
Journal Article
Gächter, S., Starmer, C., & Tufano, F. (2025). Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production. Review of Economics and Statistics, 107(2), 539-554. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01283

We introduce "group cohesion" to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the "oneness scale" from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre-register... Read More about Measuring “Group Cohesion” to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production.