Richard Musgrave coined the terminology of merit wants and merit goods in the 1950s in the context of the theory of public finance. He pointed out that certain goods such as free school lunches or subsidies to low cost housing did not have pure public or private good characteristics. If a...

Collective action is (fundamentally) a problem of moral, political or ideological consensus of meta-preferences or emotional coordination. It is also a problem of negotiation and the intensity of preference-dependent cooperation (ordering individual and collective results). Even though...

We test an assortative mechanism whereby groups are formed endogenously, through the use of voting. Once formed, groups play a public-goods game, where the social value of an incremental contribution to the group account increases with the size of the group. Societies of nine people are...

This paper provides a narrative of the emergence of the standard textbook definition of public goods. It focuses on Richard A. Musgrave's contribution in defining public goods as non-rival and non-excludable — from 1937 to 1973. Although Samuelson's mathematical definition is generally used in...

In this paper I examine the relationship between Pareto-optimality and group size in linear public goods games or experiments. In particular, I use the standard setting of homogeneous linear public goods experiments and apply a recently developed tool to identify all Pareto-optimal allocations...

The paper reviews some of the most representative Italian scholars, starting from De Viti de Marco and ending with Fasiani, conventionally considered the first and the last scholar of the Italian tradition. Their positions are discussed firstly in terms of the economic role they attributed to...

Antonio De Viti de Marco is perhaps the most representative scholar at the origin of the Italian tradition in Public Finance: this paper follows the path of his teaching from 1886 up until the final draft of 1939. Interest is, however, limited to the justification of public intervention on the...

There is ample evidence for a "democracy premium". Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared to a top-down approach. This has been observed using field data and laboratory experiments. We present evidence from Chinese students and workers who...

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...