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The most evident shortcoming of the international agreements on climate actions is the compliance to their prescriptions. Can John Rawls's social contract theory help us to solve the problem? We apply the veil of ignorance decision-making setting in a sequential dictator game to study the compliance to climate change agreements and we test the model in a laboratory experiment. The veil of ignorance shows to be very powerful at inducing the subjects to converge on a sustainable intergenerational path. However, the voluntary compliance to the agreement still remains an open issue, because even small incentives to defect can undermine the compliance stability, and therefore break the whole sustainable dynamic.

In this study, we experimentally analyze the effectiveness of payoff‐irrelevant peer‐to‐peer ratings as a cooperation enforcement device in a finitely repeated public goods game setting. We run two treatments that differ in the amount of information on own and others' received rating points provided to the players, whereas, in a third treatment, we analyze peer approval when assigning ratings to others is costly. In particular, we wonder whether, even under anonymity and in the absence of reputational concerns, (a) players rate others' contribution decisions in the expected direction and (b) the peer rating mechanisms under study foster cooperation and welfare. Our findings reveal that, in the two costless rating treatments, peer rating concerns lead to higher contributions and efficiency, compared to our control. Introducing a small fixed cost for assigning rating points results in a very high percentage of subjects deciding not to rate others' behavior, so that cooperation cannot be enforced.

In dealing with peer punishment as a cooperation enforcement device, laboratory studies have typically concentrated on discretionary sanctioning, allowing players to castigate each other arbitrarily. By contrast, in real life punishments are often meted out only insofar as punishers are entitled to punish and punishees deserve to be punished. We provide an experimental test for this 'legitimate punishment' institution and show that it yields substantial benefits to cooperation and efficiency gains, compared to a classic, 'vigilante justice' institution. We also focus on the role of feedback and we interestingly find that removing the information over high contributors' choices is sufficient to generate a dramatic decline in cooperation rates and earnings. This interaction result implies that providing feedback over virtuous behavior in the group is necessary to make a legitimate punishment scheme effective. © 2012 Elsevier Inc.

The social contract approach to the study if institutions aims at providing a solution to the problem of compliance with rational agreements in situations characterized by a conflict between individual rationality and social optimality. After a short discussion of some attempts to deal with this problem from a rational choice perspective, we focus on John Rawls's idea of 'sense of justice' and its application to the explanation of the stability of a well-ordered society. We show how the relevant features of Rawls's theory can be captured by a behavioral game theory model of beliefs-dependent dispositions to comply, and we present the results of two experimental studies that provide support to the theory.

Il dibattito sulla finanza sociale in generale e sulla finanza d'impatto sociale in particolare si è sviluppato negli ultimi anni nel mondo delle istituzioni finanziarie, dei policy makers e della comunità accademica. Gli Enti del Terzo Settore, candidati a rappresentare il lato della domanda di questo tipo di finanza, hanno finora ricoperto un ruolo marginale in tale dibattito, dimostrando scarso interesse per il fenomeno, ovvero scarsa capacità di conoscerlo e comprenderlo. Questo studio empirico nasce con l'obiettivo di dare voce alle imprese sociali, per comprendere il loro punto di vista nei confronti di strumenti finanziari innovativi che, nonostante un'ingente mobilitazione di capitali e alcune spinte politiche e legislative, nel nostro Paese faticano a decollare. I risultati raccolti rappresentano le opinioni di un ristretto gruppo di enti produttivi del Terzo settore: circa il 40% delle cooperative sociali attive in Trentino nel 2019, e costituiscono dunque solo un primo tentativo di esplorare l'opinione degli operatori sulla finanza sociale d'impatto.

Social impact finance has emerged in recent years in response to the crisis of traditional welfare systems and the gradual decrease in public funding to the Third Sector, by offering new financial instruments to convey private capital to social entrepreneurship in order to create positive social impact combined with economic returns (Agrawal and Hockerts, 2019; Daggers and Nicholls, 2016; Hochstadter and Scheck, 2015). The debate on the effective application of these instruments has so far focused on social impact as a measurement for return on invested capital, neglecting the role of motivations driving involved agents (investors and social entrepreneurs). In this work, we investigate the impact of different financial instruments on governance structures and on the motivations of social enterprise stakeholders, both from a theoretical point of view and through pilot experiments that mimic the main features of social impact finance. Our experimental design aims to recreate in the laboratory the relationship between social enterprise, beneficiaries and financiers, including the following characteristics: extremely diversified/personalized goods/services (complexity); quality of the good/service; risk (linked to the effectiveness of the intervention provided) and components related to: information asymmetries, evaluation (impact), parameters of the financial instrument. Starting from this setting, we intend to evaluate the effect on motivations of alternative evaluation methods (input, output, outcome) linked to the financial instrument.