The paper analyzes econometric models of altruistic giving in dictator and public goods games. Using existing data sets, I evaluate internal and external validity of "atheoretic" regression models as well as structural models of random behavior, random coefficients, and random utility,...

A rich body of literature has proposed that pairs behave significantly differently from individuals due to a number of reasons such as group polarization. This paper experimentally compares cooperation behaviors between pairs and individuals in a finitely-repeated two-player public goods game...

Unequally-distributed resources, whether people’s income or competence, are ubiquitous in our real world. Whether to promote competition or to lead to a more equal environment is often in question in societies or organizations. With heterogeneous endowments, we let subjects collectively choose...

Democracy resolves conflicts in difficult games like Prisoners’ Dilemma and Chicken by stabilizing their cooperative outcomes. It does so by transforming these games into games in which voters are presented with a choice between a cooperative outcome and a Pareto-inferior noncooperative...

Models on private provision of public goods typically involve a single private good and linear production technology for the public good. We study a model with several private goods and non-linear (strictly concave) production technology. We revisit the question of “neutrality” of government...

In the post-colonial world, the countries of South Asia have evolved politically in different ways, amidst internal and regional conflicts, but retained some commonality of institutions and cultures. Since the 1990s, the promise of market-led development and the growth of a middle class,...

Agricultural and rural development policies have had and have a great influence in developing areas over others, by intensifying the use of land and the abandonment of others, with effect on exodus of rural population to urban areas, soil erosion, the continued decline of many species and...

A widely accepted hypothesis is that concessions demanded by and granted to vested interests are responsible for the steady decline in the government financial position. We argue that it was rather the supply-side shocks of the seventies combined with the political objective of protecting the...