We study whether a firm that produces and sells access to an excludable public good should face a self-financing requirement, or, alternatively, receive subsidies that help to cover the cost of public-goods provision. The main result is that the desirability of a self-financing requirement is...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

This paper studies the relation between Bayesian mechanism design and the Ramsey-Boiteux approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods. For a large economy with private information about individual preferences, the two approaches are shown to be equivalent if and only if, in...

Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remain-ing firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

From the angle of competition policy, Voice over IP looks like a panacea. It not only brings better service, but it also increases competitive pressure on former telecommunications monopolists. This paper points to the largely overlooked downside. In a pure world of Internet telephony, there...

Public good provision is often local and also affects bystanders. Is provision harder if contributions harm bystanders, and is provision easier if outsiders gain a windfall profit? In an experiment we observe that both positive and negative externalities reduce provision levels whenever actors...

We study the effect of voting when insiders’ public goods provision may affect passive outsiders. Without voting insiders’ contributions do not differ, regardless of whether outsiders are positively or negatively affected or even unaffected. Voting on the recommended contribution level...

A cartel is socially not desirable. But is it a normative problem? And has merger control reason to be concerned about tacit collusion? Neither is evident once one has seen that the members of a cartel face a problem of strategic interaction. It is routinely analysed in terms of game theory....

Traditionally, there have been two separate telecommunications networks, one based on switches, the other based on routers. The switched network basically carried voice. The packet switched network basically carried data. Now voice is about to go packet switched too. Ultimately, both networks...

Customary law has been criticized from very different angles. Rational choice theorists claim that what looks like custom is nothing but self-interest. Positivists doubt that anything beyond consent assumes the force of law. In this paper, we adopt an experimental approach to test these claims....