A large group of experimentalists have analyzed the nature of free riding in the context of so-called public exchanges, a laboratory device for investigating the consequences of various aspects of non-rivalry in consumption related to voluntary public goods. However, there have been few attempts...

'Until not much more than 20 years ago, economists frequently lamented the fact that they were limited in their empirical analyses to statistical assessments of market behavior, because controlled economic experiments were (thought to be) infeasible, unethical, or both. Much has changed in the...