We propose a simple mechanism that might improve voluntary contributions to public goods. Using a laboratory experiment we analyze how bundling public with private goods affects individuals' valuations for both goods. In the experiment, subjects may purchase a private and a public good either...

It is often argued that the optimal level of public good provision is below the first-best level as long as the government's expenditures have to be financed by distortionary taxes. I examine this hypothesis and show that it is correct in a representative consumer economy if (i) the public good...

Recently, it became customary to argue that environmental quality - like ordinary public consumption - is crowded out by distortionary taxation. We show that this hypothesis does not hold provided that the marginal revenue of the environmental tax is positive. In this case, under-provision of...

Due to the use of distortionary taxation, real-world economies should attain a lower level of public expenditures than one might suspect from the analysis of artificial models where lump-sum taxes are assumed to be available. The paper examines this popular hypothesis by means of the two-type...

On the basis of problems related to asymmetric information, self-governance has been proposed and often empirically found to be superior to the external imposition of rules in social dilemma situations. The present paper suggests and experimentally analyses a different line of argument, namely...

Using the traditional model of voluntary public good provision, it is shown that an expansion of group size exacerbates free riding tendencies as long as private consumption and the public good are strictly normal and weak gross substitutes. This result generalizes a previous Cobb-Douglas...

Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such context many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...