The development and use of long-lived public goods involves more than one demographic generation, leaving the classic literature on voluntary provisions partially unfit to explain complex phenomena such as welfare systems, climate policies and major infrastructure projects. This paper proposes a...

This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and social norms. The authors experimentally investigate the role of imitation and temporal decisional patterns when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. They identify two main...

Economic Institutions, Markets and Competition will be welcomed for exploring the implications of centralization and decentralization in the transformation of economic systems and for emphasizing market structure as well as market competition.

Tax evasion has been mainly studied as a problem of choice under uncertainty; like any portfolio manager, the taxpayer has to allocate his/her fixed gross income between two assets: a risky asset, tax evasion, and a safe asset, tax payment. This approach, however, does not take full account of...

The current experimental study examined the effect of monetary rewards on tax compliance. Eighty-six participants were randomly assigned to one control and two reward conditions (low vs. high reward). Overall, tax compliance was not affected by the rewards. However, a change in compliance...

Group membership increases cooperation in social dilemma games, altruistic donation in dictator games, and fair offers in ultimatum games. While the empirical study of group action has grown rapidly over the years, there is little agreement at the theoretical level on exactly why and how group...

Nudge policies are typically justified from paternalistic premises: nudges are acceptable if they benefit the individuals who are nudged. A tacit assumption behind this strategy is that the biases of decision that choice architects attempt to eliminate generate costs that are paid mainly by the...

This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and social norms. We experimentally investigate the role of imitation when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. We identify two main reasons for imitative behavior. First, individuals...