We use a laboratory experiment to identify the impact of risk in the private and public dimensions of social investments. In variants of a public good game, we separate the return a subject's investment generates for herself vs. the return to others. We find a detrimental effect of risk on...

This paper considers investments in cost-reducing technology in the context of contributions to climate protection. Contributions to mitigating climate change are analyzed in a two-period model where later contributions can be based on better information, but delaying the contribution to the...

We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences. Moreover, there is aggregate uncertainty so that the social benefits from taxation and public goods provision are a priori unknown. The analysis is based on a...

The paper studies efficient public-good provision in a model with private values whose distribution depends on a macro shock; conditionally on this shock, values are independent and identically distributed. A generalization of the Bayesian mechanism of d'Aspremont and Gérard-Varet is shown to...

The paper studies efficient public-good provision in a model with private values whose distribution depends on a macro shock; conditionally on this shock, values are independent and identically distributed. A generalization of the Bayesian mechanism of d’Aspremont and Gérard-Varet is shown to...

Effective communication of risks involved in the climate change discussion is crucial and despite ambitious protection policies, the possibility of irreversible consequences actually occurring can only be diminished but never ruled out completely. We present a laboratory experiment that studies...

This paper considers investments in cost-reducing technology in the context of contributions to climate protection. Contributions to mitigating climate change are analyzed in a two-period model where later contributions can be based on better information, but delaying the contribution to the...

We explored experimentally how threshold uncertainty affects coordination success in a threshold public goods game. Whereas all groups succeeded in providing the public good when the exact value of the threshold was known, uncertainty was generally detrimental for the public good provision. The...

We explored experimentally how threshold uncertainty affects coordination success in a threshold public goods game. Whereas all groups succeeded in providing the public good when the exact value of the threshold was known, uncertainty was generally detrimental for the public good provision. The...

Uncertainties and risks in the decision making process are abundant in the area of environmental economics, irrespective of whether the problems being discussed are local or global. This paper uses laboratory evidence from public goods games to examine how in payoff equivalent situations,...