Safety is costly, but lack of safety can be even more expensive. This contribution considers the various dimensions of “Economics of Safety”, ranging from safety at work to road safety, terrorism and crime. Economic science helps to understand the role of safety as a (public or private) good...

This paper considers a model of voluntary public good provision with two players and convex costs. I demonstrate that the provision of public good is higher in the sequential framework under fairly general conditions. This outcome shows that introducing convex costs may reverse under some...

The efficiency of “quasimarkets”—decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition—is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement in political economy called “neoconsolidationism” began to challenge this wisdom. The...

Decisions on joint funding of continuous public goods between two agents often involve heterogeneous targets. We introduce loss functions in a contribution game in order to study the effect of this conflict. Unlike Varian (1994), joint contribution occurs only if the players’ targets are...

Social fragmentation has been identified as a potential cause for the under-provision of public goods in developing nations, as well as in urban communities in developed countries such as the U.S. We study the effect of social fragmentation on public good provision using laboratory experiments....

The current British Government's "Big Society" plan is based on the idea that granting more freedom to local communities and volunteers will compensate for a withdrawal of public agencies and spending. This idea is grounded on a widely held belief about the relationship between government and...

Using survey data on fishermen and fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia from 2005 and 2007, this paper examines the effect of the December 2004 tsunami and resulting massive aid effort on local public good provision, in particular on public labor inputs, but also public capital choices. Also...

We experiment a new mechanism for the provision of a discrete public good: in a fixed period individuals can contribute several times; at any moment they can see the total amount collected; at the end of the period, the public good is provided if the amount covers the cost. We find that the...

This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large. What distinguishes the public good investigated in this analysis is its direct provision technology which is commonplace in modern information technologies.

We run a public good experiment with four different treatments. The payoff function is chosen such that the Nash equilibrium (NE) and the collective optimum (CO) are both in the interior of the strategy space. We try to test the effect of varying the level of the collective optimum, which...