Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding. We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of 'like-minded' cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly-composed...

In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a coexpulsion baseline. Expulsions were strictly of the lowest contributors, and there was an...

This paper provides laboratory evidence on the efficiency-enhancing properties of the Tiebout model as a decentralized system of public goods provision. Tiebout (1956) shows that if a sufficient number of local communities exist to accommodate different types of preferences, individuals sort...

Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly wrongly assume that taxation is necessary to finance public goods. Taxation isn't necessary to finance public goods because free riding is an institutional artifact of the analytical dichotomy between public and private goods, which prevents...

There is an ongoing debate over whether or not a trademark is “property,” and what the appropriate boundaries of such a property right might be. Some scholars assert that rules and justifications developed to handle rights in real property are generally a poor fit for intellectual property...

We conduct an artefactual field experiment to study whether the individual preferences and propensity to cooperate of temporary workers differ from permanent contract workers. We find that temporary and permanent contract workers have different other-regarding preferences, but display similar...

Spatial institutions of government vary greatly across countries. First, some countries adopted a strict vertical hierarchy while some others have a system of autonomous governments. Second, in the case of autonomous governments, spatial scale appears to be negatively associated with government...

Consider a non-governmental organization (NGO) that can invest in a public good. Should the government or the NGO own the public project? In an incomplete contracting framework with split-the-difference bargaining, Besley and Ghatak (2001) argue that the party who values the public good most...

The government and a non-governmental organization (NGO) can invest in the provision of a public good. Who should be the owner of the public project? In an incomplete contracting model in which ex post negotiations are without frictions, the party that values the public good most should be the...

Who should own public projects? We report data from a laboratory experiment with 480 participants that was designed to test Besley and Ghatak's (2001) public-good version of the Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory. Consider two parties, one of whom can invest in the provision of a public...