In recent years, the call for business actors to be part of collaborations addressing sustainable development has become more common. There is a consensus that no single sector alone can solve the environmental problems and poverty conditions challenging humanity. However, it is not clear if these cross-sector collaborations thrive when disasters can strike any time and when some actors are richer than others. Through a series of experiments involving threshold public goods games with stochastic shocks, this dissertation contains three related papers exploring different facets of the persistence of cooperation. The experiments were conducted in Sweden, the Philippines and South Africa, countries with varying disaster risk exposures and income structures. Cooperation in the face of disaster explores the effects of different types of uncertainties on cooperation, particularly when there is a risk for repeated disasters (i.e. losses resulting from inadequate cooperation). The results show that cooperation persists when we do not know when disasters may strike (i.e. timing), as well as when there are uncertainties on what is required to avoid the disaster (i.e. threshold) and which losses will be incurred (i.e. impact). Conditional cooperation and disaster uncertainty explores the mechanism behind the persistence of cooperation, as it investigates if conditionality continues to prevail in the face of disaster. The findings show that conditionality and free-riding attenuates while unconditional cooperation accelerates. Cooperating in an unequal and uncertain world explores what happens when inequality enters the picture. The findings reveal that cooperation remains the same when there is inequality and increases in the presence of uncertainty. The effect of uncertainty is stronger than inequality, with high unconditional cooperation and low freeriding. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2015</p>

Cooperation in joint enterprises poses a social dilemma. How can altruistic behavior be sustained if selfish alternatives provide a higher payoff? This social dilemma can be overcome by the threat of sanctions. But a sanctioning system is itself a public good and poses a second-order social dilemma. In this paper, we show by means of deterministic and stochastic evolutionary game theory that imitation-driven evolution can lead to the emergence of cooperation based on punishment, provided the participation in the joint enterprise is not compulsory. This surprising result - cooperation can be enforced if participation is voluntary - holds even in the case of 'strong altruism', when the benefits of a player's contribution are reaped by the other participants only. (authors' abstract)