Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly wrongly assume that taxation is necessary to finance public goods. Taxation isn't necessary to finance public goods because free riding is an institutional artifact of the analytical dichotomy between public and private goods, which prevents...

Self-governance of common pool resources is presumed to work well in small, homogeneous communities where interaction is repeated, agents have low discount rates, and information about past performance is available. It is presumed to work poorly elsewhere. This paper provides a case study of...

This paper uses Vincent Ostrom's treatment of government as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront the research program he pursued in the theory of human association. To enable this exploration, I replace the standard resort to the law of the excluded middle with...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

We develop a simple model of collective experimentation and take it to the lab. In equilibrium, as in the recent work of Strulovici (2010), majority rule has a bias toward under-experimentation, as good news for a minority of voters may lead a majority of voters to abandon a policy when each of...

This paper surveys research of lab experiments on voting games, focusing on six areas that have received much attention in the last few decades: (i) costly voting in elections with two alternatives; (ii) (other) collective action problems; (iii) elections with more than two alternatives; (iv)...

This paper uses Vincent Ostrom’s treatment of democracy as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront his research program into the theory of human association. To carry this exploration, I concentrate on Ostrom’s 1997 book, The Meaning of Democracy and the...

Philanthropy, and particularly ensuring that one's giving is effective, can require substantial time and effort. One way to reduce these costs, and thus encourage greater giving, could be to encourage delegation of giving decisions to better-informed others. At the same time, because it involves...

The provision of public goods is often used to justify the state. Since many highly-valued goods such as education, national defense, roads, etc., possess some public characteristics (i.e. non-rivalry and non-excludability), standard theory predicts such goods will be underprovided by private...

We study a setting in which the education system privileges some identities and marginalizes others. When the ideal identity prescribed by the education system evolves with the composition of the educated subpopulation, persistent educational inequality can emerge even when communities are ex...