Suppose agents can exert costly effort that creates nonrival, heterogeneous benefits for each other. At each possible outcome, a weighted, directed network describing marginal externalities is defined. We show that Pareto efficient outcomes are those at which the largest eigenvalue of the...

We prove existence and generic regularity of equilibria in a general equilibrium model of a completely decentralized pure public good economy. Competitive firms using private goods as inputs produce the public good, which is privately provided by households. Previous studies on private provision...

We analyse two team settings in which one member in a team has stronger incentives to contribute than the others. If contributions constitute a sacrifice for the strong player, the other team members are more inclined to cooperate than if contributions are strictly dominant for the strong...

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

We present results from a multiple public goods experiment, where each public good produces benefits only if total contributions to it reach a minimum threshold. The experiment allows us to compare a subject's behavior in a benchmark treatment with a single public good and in treatments with...

The concept of public goods is confusing because it confounds three analytically distinct concepts: excludability, rivalry, and public finance. Pure public goods are of limited relevance as an explanation of government spending. To make matters worse, the broader policy community uses the term...

When multiple charities, social programs and community projects simultaneously vie for funding, donors risk miscoordinating their contributions leading to an inefficient distribution of funding across projects. Community chests and other intermediary organizations facilitate coordination among...

Experiments involving multiple public goods with contribution thresholds capture many features of charitable giving environments in which donors try to coordinate their contributions across various potential recipients. We present results from a laboratory experiment that introduces endowment...

Public goods are traditionally classified according to an exogenous, technological definition of possessing the characteristics of nonrivalry and nonexcludability. This paper takes a more endogenous approach, where goods are defined by the political purposes that specific actors have revolving...

Standard public goods games often assign group members the same marginal per capita returns to public goods production, but in reality group members facing differential individual returns often must collaborate to produce a public good. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate the...