Theoretical models have had difficulties to account, at the same time, for the most important stylized facts observed in experiments of the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism. A recent approach tackling that gap is Arifovic and Ledyard (2012), which implements social preferences in tandem with an...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

This paper addresses the question of whether our evolutionary history suggests that humans are likely to be individually selected selfish maximizers or group selected altruists. It surveys models from the literature of evolutionary biology in which groups are formed and dissolved and where the...

We characterise the entire set of symmetric stationary Markov-perfect Nash equilibria (MPE) in a differential game of public good investment, using the canonical problem of climate change as an example. We provide a sufficient and necessary condition for MPE and show how the entire set of MPE is...

We characterize the entire set of symmetric stationary Markov-perfect Nash equilibria (MPE) in a differential game of public good investment, using the canonical problem of climate change as an example. We provide a sufficient and necessary condition for MPE and show how the entire set of MPE is...

A simple sufficient condition is proved for symmetric Markov subgame perfect Nash equilibria in public-good differential games with a single state variable. The condition admits equilibria in feedback strategies that have discontinuous dependence on the state variable. The application of the...

Attempts to curb illegal activity through regulation gets complicated when agents can adapt to circumvent enforcement. Economic theory suggests that conducting audits on a predictable schedule, and (counter-intuitively) at high frequency, can undermine the effectiveness of audits. We conduct a...

We characterise the entire set of symmetric stationary Markov-perfect Nash equilibria (MPE) in a differential game of public good investment, using the canonical problem of climate change as an example. We provide a sufficient and necessary condition for MPE and show how the entire set of MPE is...

We characterise the entire set of symmetric stationary Markov-perfect Nash equilibria (MPE) in a differential game of public good investment, using the canonical problem of climate change as an example. We provide a sufficient and necessary condition for MPE and show how the entire set of MPE is...

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...