Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

The recent literature suggests that people have social preferences with a self-serving bias. Our data analysis reveals that the stylized fact of declining cooperation in repeated public goods experiments results from this bias and adaptation.

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

We propose a two dimensional infinite horizon model of public consumption in which investments are decided by a winner-take-all election. Investments in the two public goods create a linkage across periods and parties have different specialities. We show that the incumbent party vote share...

A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group, only if the sum of their bids exceeds a reserve...

In a two-stage two-public good experiment, we study the effect that subjects’ possibility of contributing to a public good in the first stage of the game has on the voluntary contributions to the second public good. Our results show that subjects do not follow either the Nash strategy or the...

Charities publicize the donations they receive, generally according to dollar categories rather than the exact amount. Donors in turn tend to give the minimum amount necessary to get into a category. These facts suggest that donors have a taste for having their donations made public. This paper...

This paper surveys a selection of the literature on the private provision of public goods using the Kolm triangle. (The Kolm triangle is the analogue of an Edgeworth box in an economy with a public good.) We provide simple geometrical proofs of various established results using this graphical...

This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a...

Climate change is the exemplary global public good, because each country’s emissions of greenhouse gases contribute cumulatively to the increase of the overall concentration, and each country’s abatements entail higher cost than benefit, unless effective concerted collective actions take...