Pledge-and-review in the laboratory

We perform a laboratory test of Pledge-and-Review bargaining, implementing a simplified version of the model analysed in Harstad (2021a). In theory, this institution should increase contributions to a public good only if there is uncertainty over the value of possible future payoffs. In contrast, we find that Pledge-and-Review increases efficiency in all the settings we investigate, and that the improvement is most persistent in our setting without uncertainty. Our results suggest that the Pledge-and-Review institution may be useful, even without uncertainty, as it allows conditional cooperators to test, risk free, the cooperativeness of their partners. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.