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The main goal of collective punishment (CP) is the deterrence of future "wrong-doing" by freedom fighters or terrorists, protesters against an authoritative government, polluters, students playing pranks on their teacher, football teams lacking enthusiasm, or soldiers showing cowardice to the enemy. CP could consist of the lockout of workers, additional training units for football teams, increased control of athletes and firms, up to the shooting of fellow villagers of assassins. I investigate two classes of problems. In one class, resistance against an authority is individually costly, but enough resistance can be successful (the production of a public good, for example, higher wages after a strike). In the other case, "resistance" is individually profitable (a criminal activity as pollution) and enough "resistance" produces a public bad. We find that, in the first situation, the announcement of CP never decreases the level of resistance. In the second situation, CP can be successful.

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the 'true majority' . If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the 'true majority' prevails. It is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders), with multiple necessary majorities (European Union decision-making), or even more general rules. Simultaneous voting in the general model has more differentiated results.

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the "true majority". If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the "true majority" prevails (Groseclose and Milyo, 2010, 2013). In this paper, it is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders) or with multiple necessary majorities (EU decision making). Simultaneous voting in the general model can be plagued by non-existent or non-unique pure strategy equilibria under most preference constellations.

The launch of a public project requires support from enough members of a group. Members (players) are differently important for the project and have different cost/benefit relations. There are players who profit and players who suffer from the launch of the project. Examples are the Kyoto protocol, voting with different weights (shareholders, the UN with the veto power of the Security Council members), and international scientific or military expeditions. As coordination on one of the usually many pure strategy equilibria is difficult, mixed strategy equilibria are the focus of this investigation. If all players profit from the launch of the project then, despite the unnecessary costs, the requirement of full contributions is a Pareto-improvement to every original threshold. The contribution probabilities of some player types defined by their importance are characterized according to their cost/benefit relations.

Shifting the responsibility for a necessary but costly action to someone else is often called Passing the Buck. Examples of such behavior in politics are environmental and budget problems which are left to future generations. Small group examples are (not) washing the dishes or (not) dealing with a difficult customer. Under the assumption of altruistic preferences, rational behavior in this game is derived and confronted with experimental data. By comparison, the sequence of possible decision makers in the normal Passing the Buck game is substituted with an expert who alone is competent to fix the problem. It turned out that the marginal probabilities of shifting the responsibility are in good accordance with the theoretical model, although with completely different parameter distributions for experts and non-experts. The structure of the individual decisions, however, is best described by a random parameter model (Cox et al., 2007).