This Paper deals with collective decision making within a group of independent jurisdictions. The right to choose the public policy is delegated from the central authority of one of the jurisdictions through a bidding procedure among the group members. We identify the following trade-off:...

This Paper analyses an overlapping generation model of public good provision under repeated voting. The public good is financed through age-dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment. Taxes redistribute income both across different skill groups and across generations. We contrast...

The imposition of sanctions is one of the most common means of enforcing cooperation in decentralized interactions. Typically, agents are asymmetric in the sense that each has a different sanctioning power. Using a public-good experiment we analyze such a decentralized punishment institution in...

We analyze the effect of a large group on an impure public goods model with lotteries. We show that as populations get large, and with selfish preferences, the level of contributions converges to the one given by voluntary contributions. With altruistic preferences (of the warm glow type), the...