Bergstrom, Blume and Varian (1986) provides an elegant gametheoretic model of an economy with one private good and one public good. Strategies of players consist of voluntary contributions of the private good to public good production. Without relying on first order conditions, the authors...

We revisit the classical result that taxation of private consumption is distortionary and therefore precludes the efficient provision of public goods. We introduce a nonlinear consumption tax which we call a ‘tax lottery’. Under this scheme, an ad-valorem consumption tax is supplemented with...

Evolutionary game theory has shown that in environments characterised by a social-dilemma situation punishment may be an adaptive behaviour. Experimental evidence closely corresponds to this finding but yields contradictory results on the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment if players are...

Sanctioning increases cooperation in public goods games, but not indiscriminately under all conditions and in all societies, and the mechanisms by which sanctioning exercises its impact on behavior are yet to be studied in detail. We show experimentally that in the presence of sanctioning, our...

Bergstrom, Blume and Varian (1986) provides an elegant gametheoretic model of an economy with one private good and one public good. Strategies of players consist of voluntary contributions of the private good to public good production. Without relying on first order conditions, the authors...

Bergstrom, Blume and Varian (1986) provides an elegant gametheoretic model of an economy with one private good and one public good. Strategies of players consist of voluntary contributions of the private good to public good production. Without relying on first order conditions, the authors...

Established already in the Biblical times, the Matthew effect stands for the fact that in societies rich tend to get richer and the potent even more powerful. Here we investigate a game theoretical model describing the evolution of cooperation on structured populations where the distribution of...

As the Copenhagen Accord indicates, most of the international community agrees that global mean temperature should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels to avoid unacceptable damages from climate change. The scientific evidence distilled in the Fourth...

The efficiency of institutionalized punishment is studied by evaluating the stationary states in the spatial public goods game comprising unconditional defectors, cooperators, and cooperating pool-punishers as the three competing strategies. Fine and cost of pool-punishment are considered as the...

We study the evolution of cooperation in public goods games on the square lattice, focusing on the effects that are brought about by different sizes of groups where individuals collect their payoffs and search for potential strategy donors. We find that increasing the group size does not...