A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness, we derive a bidding mechanism determining endogenously who participates in...

This paper analyzes “constitutional effectiveness” – the degree to which constitutions can be enforced – in the system of government vs. the system of clubs. I argue that clubs have residual claimants on revenues generated through constitutional compliance, operate in a highly...

There has been a division of labor in the “behavioral sciences”. This is perhaps most striking in two of the largest behavioral disciplines, economics and psychology. Since 1990, a number of economists have crossed this boundary. But James Buchanan was one of the first economists to take the...

When do policies generate expressive or backlash effects? Recent economic models suggest that where a proscribed activity is prevalent, permissive laws liberalize attitudes toward partakers while increasing utility. The opposite occurs in communities where the proscribed activity is rare. To...

This paper presents a novel theoretical framework to explain the occurrence of corruption in public procurement. It extends the agency cost-padding model by Laffont and Tirole (1992) to allow for the principal to be a partially selfish politician who can design the contract auditing policy. It...

This paper utilizes data from a laboratory experiment in order to examine the advantages and disadvantages of subjective measures. Our results indicate good and bad news: subjective measures correlate highly with the variables they are designed to capture but they also systematically suffer from...

This paper investigates the role of guilt aversion for corruption in public administration. Corruption is modeled as the outcome of a game played between a bureaucrat, a lobby, and the public. There is a moral cost of corruption for the bureaucrat, who is averse to letting the public down. We...

We investigate the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. We further explore the changes in lying and reporting behavior that result from giving individuals a say in who joins their group. We find that enough...

We build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity–child quality trade-off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital. By integrating the theoretical analyses of...

This paper provides a simply theory to explain the impact of sanctions on a regime's policies and behavior. Sanctions are generally put to strip the target country from its available rents and weaken the government's stance against growing discontent in the population. We show however that...