We investigate consumer response to various types of advertising for fruits and vegetables—a food category which health officials uniformly agree is significantly underconsumed in the United States. Using an adult, non-student subject pool of participants in the experiment, consumers’...

Generic promotion and advertising activities have traditionally been used to promote individual agricultural commodities. However, there is renewed interest in implementing a mandatory ―broad-based‖ promotion program for all fruits and vegetables, and this idea is highly controversial among...

Recently there is much interest among horticultural producers concerning the marketing of organically- and locally- produced food. Here we developed a consumer survey that asked respondents to choose an applesauce product from a list of products differentiated by price and four attributes. The...

Standard economic analysis assumes the sets of public and private goods to be exogenously given. Yet societies very often choose the public-private mix, using resources to convert seemingly private goods into ones with public goods characteristics and vice versa. And, in practice, we see a...

We develop an integrated, general equilibrium, model of how the presence of vertical ties of ‘community’ between sections of workers and sections of capitalists can critically affect the distribution of income between capitalists as a class and workers as a class, as well as between workers...

We analyze conflicts between communities. A community-specific public good, to which members make voluntary contributions, defines communities. Some, but not all, members of one community may contribute towards another community’s public good. Such ‘bridging’ contributions will not occur...

This paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war adversely affects the performance of social indicators in general, poorer countries lose less, in absolute and relative terms, than richer countries. It is argued that the...

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the...

This paper utilizes laboratory and field experiments to test the use of a provision point mechanism to finance renewable energy programs, commonly known as green pricing programs. The mechanism solicits discrete contributions towards a provision threshold using a money-back guarantee for...

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is commonly perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditures. We examine the logic of this exemption....