Eliciting sincere preferences for non-market goods remains a challenge due to hypothetical bias - the so-called gap between hypothetical monetary values and real economic commitments. The gap arises because people either overstate hypothetical values or understate real commitments or a...

A vast recent literature has stressed social fragmentation's negative impact on the provision of public goods. It has been established theoretically that social fragmentation engenders discord and thereby undermines public goods provision. Empirical research has produced mixed results about this...

A vast recent literature has stressed social fragmentation's negative impact on the provision of public goods. This is a key issue, given that public goods availability has been reckoned as crucial to economic development, while developing countries' societies often exhibit high degrees of...

Environmental economics is now a long standing field of research ; much has been learned on how environmental policy can use incentives to drive individual behaviors. Among the many examples, preference elicitation is the most discussed case in which incentives fail to accurately implement...

Caste rules prohibit the sharing of water between castes as a contact made by an untouchable with water ritually taints the source. Despite untouchability practices being outlawed by the Constitution of India, they are still vigorous and violently enforced. This is what is investigated in this...

This paper investigates the factors underlying the emergence of Research Cluster (RC), i.e. cooperation (or coordination of research efforts) through spatial proximity between public and private research teams. A ‘public lab’ and a ‘private lab’ interact in a two-stage game to decide on...

We build a model to study optimal land use, encompassing land use activities, pollution and climate change. This benchmark set-up allows us to identify the spatial drivers behind the interaction between land use and the environment. Pollution generates local and global damages since it flows...

In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework for exploring the consequences of neighborhood informational effects - identified as role models - so as to deduce the urban configuration. With this aim, we have developed an overlapping generations model of community formation. When young, an...

The paper concerns a dynamic model of influence in which agents have to make a yes-no decision. Each agent has an initial opinion, which he may change during different phases of interaction, due to mutual influence among agents. The influence mechanism is assumed to be stochastic and to follow a...

We generalize a yes-no model of influence in a social network with a single step of mutual influence to a framework with iterated influence. Each agent makes an acceptance- rejection decision and has an inclination to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Due to influence by others, an agent's...