We report experimental findings on the role of charitable promises in bargaining settings. We vary the enforceability of such promises within variants of ultimatum games where the proposer suggest a split between himself, the responder and a char-itable donation. By reneging on initial pledges,...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. The analysis can easily be reinterpreted as a model of the monopolistic provision of excludable public goods under private information. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order to start production and sell the related good to a limited number of potential buyers who are privately informed about their...

We study the provision of public goods. Different public goods can be bundled provided there is enough capacity, i.e. resources to pay for all the public goods in the bundle. The analysis focuses on the all-or-nothing-mechanism: Expand provision as much as resource feasible if no one vetoes -...

Scholars have highlighted how local elites can use their de facto power to capture democracy. This makes electoral competition particularly vulnerable in armed conflicts driven by politics. Would a reduction in politically motivated violence perpetrated by local elites promote electoral...

Patent, copyright, trade secret, and other exclusionary laws regarding intellectual property convert new-product research and development from a public/common good into a private good. To the extent that R&D is a private good, the argument that it, as a public good, needs to be subsidized...