In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start of high and decline as the game is repeated. If high contributors are matched, however, contributions tend to stay high. We propose a formalization predicting that high contributors will selfselect into groups committed to charitable...

Primary care physicians have two roles: the healer and the gatekeeper. We show that, due to information asymmetries, they cannot be expected to fulfill the latter role. Better gatekeepers will be poorer healers; hence all patients, both truly sick and shirkers, will strictly prefer physicians...

In social dilemmas, there is tension between cooperation that promotes the common good and the pursuit of individual interests. International climate change negotiations provide one example: although abatement costs are borne by individual countries, the benefits are shared globally. We study a...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...

This paper considers the role which selfish, moral and social incentives and pressures play in explaining the extent to which stated choices over pro-environment behaviours vary across individuals. The empirical context is choices over household waste contracts and recycling actions in Poland. A...

I explore possible impacts of reciprocal preferences on participation in international environmental agreements. Reciprocal countries condition their willingness to abate on others' abatement. No participation is always stable. A full or majority coalition can be stable, provided that...

It is often argued that projects involving public good changes should be chosen on the basis of monetary valuation and cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In democratic project selection processes, however, decision-makers cannot generally interpret CBA as measuring projects' social welfare effects....

“Green” consumers appear to accept individual responsibility for public good provision. The propensity to take such responsibility may depend on beliefs about others’ behavior, even for consumers motivated by internalized moral norms, not by social sanctions. This can produce multiple...

Several studies have demonstrated that individual contributions to public goods are increasing in others’ contributions. The underlying causes for this, however, are not yet fully understood. We present a model of duty-orientation in which moral responsibility is learned through observations...

Morally motivated individuals behave more cooperatively than predicted by standard theory. Hence,if a firm can attract workers who are strongly motivated by ethical concerns, moral hazard problems like shirking can be reduced. We show that employers may be able to use the firm’s corporate...