The ability to punish free-riders can increase the provision of public goods. However, sometimes, the benefit of increased public good provision is outweighed by the costs of punishments. One reason a group may punish to the point that net welfare is reduced is that punishment can express anger...

Quasilinear preferences on a public good and a numeraire good are limits of preferences where both goods are normal. The set of equilibria of the voluntary contribution (or private provision) game is easily characterized under quasilinearity by: top valuators aggregately contribute their common...

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...

We investigate experimentally whether the extent of conditional cooperation in public good games depends on the marginal per capita return (MPCR) to the public good and type of game. The MPCR is varied from 0.2 to 0.4 to 0.8. The "standard" game, in which three players contribute before a...

The paper formulates a piecewise linearized version of the procedure developed by Sato (1983) and analyzes its properties. In so doing, Fujigaki’s (1981) private goods economy is extended to involve a public good; and the intertemporal game of Champsaur and Laroque is piecewise localized by...

In this paper, the author analyzes the behavior of local governments in capital taxation when the financial choices in terms of the quality of public goods are made done by a central planner. More specifically, he asks the question of whether a local government has an interest in taxing the...

This paper analyzes the equilibrium strength of prescriptive norms to contribute to public goods. We consider three methods of establishing what an acceptable contribution to the public good is. Under the first method, the contribution of the bottom contributor is the reference point by which...

Many public projects are funded in a dynamic manner in which contributors are able to make gradual increases in contributions and condition additional contributions on the cooperation of others. This study presents results from experiments in which subjects with an initial fixed endowment make...