We develop a theoretical model in which each individual is, in some ultimate sense, motivated by purely egoistic satisfaction derived from the goods accruing to him, but there is an implicit social contract such that each performs duties for the others in a way that enhances the satisfaction of...

This text (Keser) is a survey and a discussion of experimental studies on cooperation in public goods experiments. It is followed by a comment (Montmarquette) suggesting some economic applications from these experimental studies. Ce texte (Keser) présente une revue et une discussion des écrits...

We show that the famous neutrality result in the theory of public good contributions (Warr, Kemp, Bergstrom, Blume and Varian) depends crucially on the assumption that agents do not take into account the effect of their public good contribution decisions on the relative price of the private...

We compare voluntary contributions to a public good in a symmetric setting to those in a weakly and a strongly asymmetric setting, where the players have different, randomly allocated endowments. We observe that the group-contribution levels are not significantly different between the symmetric...