For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

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...

The public good experiment has been used as both a teaching and research tool. In almost all instances it has been designed without reference to a specific public good or real-world application. This is done so participants' feelings or experiences involving the public good do not affect their...

Der entwicklungsökonomische Diskurs ist aktuell geprägt durch eine kontroverse Debatte zwischen Jeffrey Sachs und William Easterly. Der Beitrag rekonstruiert beide Ansätze aus ordonomischer Perspektive. Er argumentiert, dass eine auf Kooperation angelegte Semantik vergleichsweise besser...

User trust is an essential resource for the information economy. Without it, people will share less of their personal information and the digital economy will falter. Companies that use personal information do not protect this resource sufficiently. Instead, many take advantage of it for...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries - Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are the correlations between experimental choices with indicators regarding the security of property, trust and the quality of...

Evidence from an experiment investigating the house money effect in the context of a public goods game is reconsidered. Analysis is performed within the framework of the panel hurdle model, in which subjects are assumed to be one of two types: free-riders, and potential contributors. The effect...

Economic behavior often takes place in groups of small numbers of peopleinteracting with each other (like work teams, neighborhoods, socialnetworks, etc.). Characteristic of such interaction is the development of(affective) interpersonal relationships, or social ties. According tosociologists,...

The formation of social ties is examined in an experimental study of voluntary public good provision. The experiment consists of three parts. In the first part the value orientation (attitude to a generalized other) ismeasured. In the second part couples play 25 periods of a public good game. In...

This paper studies behavior in experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries. Our 'contribution function' design allows us to obtain a view of...