Internet commerce has made it easier to compare prices and shop online.  However, it has also exposed consumers to a new kind of crime in the form of the electronic theft of payment details.  However the skills required to successfully intercept payment data differ from the skills required to...

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform.  There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of foreign aid fungibility.  Unlike the bulk of existing empirical studies, I employ panel data that contain information on the specific purpose for which aid is given.  This allows me to link aid given for education and healt purposes to recipient...

We introduce a model of redistributive income taxation and public expenditure. Besides redistributing personal income by means of taxes and transfers, the government supplies goods and services. The government chooses the tax schedule that is found acceptable by the largest share possible of the...

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. A survey focusing on econometric studies in this area reveals a plethora of sometimes...

Game harmony is a generic game property that can be used to predict cooperation in both generic and well-known normal form games. It describes how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are, as embodied in the payoffs. Pure coordination games are...

This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits whose risky arm might yield a payoff only after some exponentially distributed random time. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in any equilibrium where the players use...

In a collective-action game a player`s payoff is the sum of (i) a private component that depends only on that player`s action, and (ii) a public component, common to all players and dependent upon all actions. A classic application is the private provision of a public good. Play evolves:...

A public good is produced if and only if a team of m or more volunteers contribute to it. An equilibrium-selection problem leads to the questions: will collective action succeed? If so, who will participate in the team? The paper studies the evolution of collective action: as part of a...