The authors investigated attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in northern Ethiopia, using a tailored two-part survey experiment. On average, they found positional concerns neither in income per se, nor in income from aid projects among the farmers. These results support the claim that positional concerns are correlated with absolute level of income of a country.

Using a natural field experiment in a recreational site, a public good almost fully dependent on voluntary donations, the authors explored the crowding-out effect of gift rewards. First, they investigated whether receiving a map in appreciation of a donation crowded out prosocial behavior and found no significant effect of giving the map. Second, they explored the effect of adding the map to a treatment designed to increase donations.

Ten years ago, there was hardly any environmental enforcement by civil society or by the markets in China. In 1999–2000, the World Bank collaborated on a pilot programme with the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, Nanjing University, the Zhenjiang Environmental Protection Bureau in Jiangsu Province and the Hohhot Academy of Environmental Sciences in Inner Mongolia.

The authors studied the potential tradeoff between countries’ investments in mitigation versus adaptation to climate change. Mitigating greenhouse gases may be a public good, but adaptation to climate change is a private good, benefiting only the country or individual.

Studies have shown differences in cooperative behavior across countries and in the use of (and reaction to) a norm enforcement mechanism in cross-cultural studies.

The authors present data that prove that stark differences in both dimensions can exist even within the same town. They created a unique data set, based on one-shot public goods experiments in South Africa. Most of the group differences can be explained by variables for social capital and social environment, such as trust or household violence.

The authors used a framed field experiment with coffee farmers in Costa Rica after tropical storm Alma to explore how farmers react to different levels of risk to income and productive means from extreme weather under measurable and unmeasurable uncertainty. They also examined whether investment costs to reduce vulnerability exhibit economies of scope.

There is growing interest in understanding whether behavior is the same across locations. By holding cross- and within-country dimensions constant (in contrast to previous studies on cross-group comparisons of conditional cooperation), the authors investigated cooperative behavior between social groups in the same location. Their results reveal significantly different cooperation behavior, suggesting that different social groups exhibit differences both in terms of composition of types and extent of conditional cooperation.

Trust is measured using both survey questions and a trust experiment among a random sample of Muslim and Hindu household heads in rural Bangladesh.

In most low-income countries, rural households depend on mixed rain-fed agriculture/livestock production, which is very risky. Due to numerous market failures, there are few ways to shift risks to third parties.

We investigate the importance of relative income within the Indian Caste system, using a choice experiment.