There has been an extensive research literature on auctions, but recent developments in technology have resulted in new interest in auction mechanisms as a practical way of allocating resources. This paper presents a new double-auction mechanism to handle resource allocation for public goods...

We compare the performance of two incentive mechanisms in public goods experiments. One mechanism, the Falkinger mechanism, rewards and penalizes agents for deviations from the average contributions to the public good (Falkinger mechanism). The other, the compensation mechanism, allows agents to...

This paper assesses the impact of migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) located in France on the provision of local public goods in Mali. To this end, we computed a dataset on all the HTAs that have been created by Malian migrants in France since 1981 and geo-localised their interventions on...

To what extent did the colonial public policy influence the current regional inequalities in the French- speaking West Africa? This paper uses the differences in development outcomes across the areas of the former French West Africa to show the existence of colonial long term effects on...

This paper studies political competition in the case of a democratization process. We present an illustrative model describing political competition when the opposition threatens the stability of the country. In some cases, our model predicts the government should invest in opposition districts...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results,...

This paper argues that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. We define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) modularity and (2) option value. Developers can often make informed judgments about modularity and...