Summary Countries differ substantially in the emphasis on the public sector and the ratio between state consumption and provision of public goods. It seems that these differences are often not well explained by only assuming a heterogeneous population. In this paper, I take differing state...

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...

We evaluate the impact of three auction mechanisms—the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, the second-price auction (SPA), and the random nth-price auction (NPA)—in the measurement of private willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept for a pure public good. Our results show that the...

Abstract Using a broad multi-country sample, we find that individuals who contribute to the public good of environmental protection report higher levels of life satisfaction and happiness. We show that this result is robust to the use of an instrumental variables technique and provide several...

Abstract A growing body of literature has succeeded in explaining the economics of existing open source communities. However, the question why such communities come into existence has so far not been answered satisfactorily. This paper addresses this question with an evolutionary model: software...

Using a broad multi-country sample, we find that individuals who contribute to the public good of environmental protection report higher levels of life satisfaction and happiness. We show that this result is robust to the use of an instrumental variables technique and provide several pieces of...

Abstract We analyze allocation of foreign aid to different sectors in a recipient developing country. Donors tend to favor social sectors over other public expenditure programs. Due to incomplete information coordination failure occurs. The donors may concentrate too much on the priority sectors...

This paper characterizes the utility possibility frontier resulting in a model of private voluntary provision of a public good. It is shown that ex-ante lotteries over resource distributions among the agents can be Pareto improving. A corollary is that an equal distribution of resources among...