The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast,...

We study pure redistribution as a device to increase cooperation and efficiency in the provision of public goods. Experimental subjects play a two-stage game. The first stage is the standard linear public goods game. In the second stage, subjects can redistribute payoffs among other subjects in...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of intergroup competition in promoting cooperative behavior. We focus on intergroup competition that is non-rival in the sense that everyone can be a winner. This type of competition does not give groups an incentive to outcompete others. However, in...

The Kyoto summit initiated an international game of cap and trade. Unlike a national policy, the essence of this game is the self-selection of national emission targets. This differs from the standard global public-goods game because targets are met in the context of a global carbon market. This...

Global cap and trade equalizes the price of emissions and leads to efficient abatement across countries, but sets the abatement level inefficiently low. It is set too low, because the global cap is the sum of individual country targets set on the basis of self-interest. The efficiency of a...

The international game of cap and trade begins when countries choose their quantity targets, which are largely selected according to self interest. The analogous public-goods game, in which countries choose their abatement levels, has an uncooperative outcome. Compared to that, the Nash...

The ability of groups to implement efficiency-enhancing institutions is emerging as a central theme of research in economics. This paper explores voting on a scheme of intergroup competition which facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma situation. Experimental results show that the...

Greenhouse gas abatement is a public good, so climate policy is a public-goods game and suffers from the free-rider incentives that make the outcome of such games notoriously uncooperative. Adopting an international agreement can change the nature of the game, reducing or exacerbating the...

This paper defines a general eqilibrium model with exchange and club formation. Agents trade multiple private goods widely in the market, can belong to several clubs, and care about the characteristics of the other members of their clubs. The space of agents is a continuum, but clubs are finite....

We investigate a simultaneous discrete public good provision game with incomplete information. To use the terminology of Admati and Perry (1991), we consider both contribution and subscription games. In the former, contributions are not refunded if the project is not completed, while in the...