Environmentalists often urge their home countries to take a leading role in reducing global environmental problems like climate change. A pertinent question is: will examples set by leading nations influence others to follow suit, and if so, do the costs of leading matter? For instance, will...

In this paper we examine the impact of information on individual contributions in a public-bad experiment. We compare two experimental treatments. In the partial information treatment, subjects are only informed about the total contributions by their group, whereas in the full information...

Limit core allocations are the ones that remain in the core of a replicated economy.An equivalent notion for economies with public goods is Schweizer s concept of club e ciency under a variable number of economic agents.We extend this notion to economies with goods that have a semi-public...

Laws consist of two components: the 'obligations' they express and the 'incentives' designed to enforce them.In this paper we run a public good experiment to test whether or not obligations have any independent effect on cooperation in social dilemmas.The results show that, for given marginal...

Why do fundraisers announce initial contributions to their charity?Potential explanations are that these announcements cause future donors to increase their contributions, either because they want to reciprocate the generosity of earlier donors, or because the initial contributions are seen as a...

When truth conflicts with efficiency, can verbal communication destroy efficiency? Or are lies or vagueness used to hide inconvenient truths? We consider a sequential 2-player public good game in which the leader has private information about the value of the public good. This value can be low,...

Limit core allocations are the ones that remain in the core of a replicated economy. An equivalent notion for economies with public goods is Schweizer's club efficiency. We extend this notion to economies with goods that have a semi-public nature. The notion encompasses purely private as well as...