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:...

Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential...

There has been little systematic study of the mechanisms typically used to raise money for charity. One of the most common is the simple raffle in which participants purchase chances to win a prize at a constant price. We conduct a field experiment randomly assigning participants to four raffle...

We adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior with egoistic agents, and assume that the household consumption is either private or public. We then show that (i) household demands have to satisfy testable constraints and (ii) some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from...

Monitoring by peers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the efficacy of mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem with repeated interactions which requires reasonably accurate public information...

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...

Economic and social interaction takes place between individuals with heterogeneous characteristics. We investigate experimentally the emergence and informal enforcement of different contribution norms to a public good in homogeneous and different heterogeneous groups. When punishment is not...

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...

Experimental studies of social dilemmas have shown that while the existence of a sanctioning institution improves cooperation within groups, it also has a detrimental impact on group earnings in the short run. Could the introduction of pre-play threats to punish have enough of a beneficial...

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India...