Contrary to communitarian market criticism institutions relying on money and bidding can strengthen faculties of ‘self-governance’. Securing procedurally egalitarian bidding on the basis of declared monetary evaluations guarantees that all realized changes of a status quo are in an...

Due to the shadow of the future, exchange and the division of labor can be self-organizing on a small scale while it seems impossible for large interaction systems. The paper indicates that the survival conditions for trustworthiness can be met even in large interaction systems and large markets...

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing motivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. 'Over-stylizing' neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates the...

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distortion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax...

We provide experimental evidence on behavior in a public goods game featuring a so-called point of no return, meaning that if the group’s total contribution falls below this point all payoffs are reduced. Participants receive either common or private signals about the point of no return, and...

Direct democracy with its use of referenda avoids the prototypical principal-agent problems of delegation in indirect democracies, especially since elected representatives are usually not committed by law to keep their promises. Sequential or more complex referenda may, however, result in an...

A robust finding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initial contribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

A novel two-person "charity game", related to the "Samaritan's Dilemma" [Buchanan, J.M., 1975. The samaritan's dilemma. In: Phelps, E.S. (Ed.), Altruism, Morality and Economic Theory. Russel Sage Foundation, New York, pp. 71-85], is used to experimentally investigate the relation between...