Greenhouse gas abatement is a public good, so climate policy is a public-goods game and suffers from the free-rider incentives that make the outcome of such games notoriously uncooperative. Adopting an international agreement can change the nature of the game, reducing or exacerbating the...

This paper solves the global cap-and-trade game exactly as the public-goods game is normally solved and finds a problematic outcome. Abatement of greenhouse gas emissions is a global public good, and supplying a public good is a game with strong incentives to free ride. Adding a cap-and-trade...

Abstract: This essay makes a conceptual distinction between societal categories, such as social networks, norms, and social status differentiation, on the one hand, and social capital, on the other. The former are institutional phenomena arising as outcomes of social-exchange games in which...

Punishment has been shown to be an effective reinforcement mechanism. Intentional or not, punishment will likely generate spillover effects that extend beyond one’s immediate decision environment, and these spillovers are not as well understood. We seek to understand these secondary spillover...

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...

The liturgical system in Classical Athens (479-322 BCE) privately provided public goods, including naval defense. I use it to evaluate mechanism design policies and to address uncertainties in the historical record by adding predictive economic theory to research by ancient historians. I...

This paper presents a model where foreign aid bolsters a developing country's proactive counterterrorism efforts against a resident transnational terrorist group. In stage 1 of the game, the donor country allocates resources to terrorism-fighting tied aid, general assistance, and defensive...

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...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of deep uncertainty about the benefits of the public good, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private information....