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...

We examine what an applicantś vita signals to potential employers about her willingness to cooperate in teams. Intensive social engagement may credibly reveal that an applicant cares about the well-being of others and therefore is less likely to free-ride in teamwork situations. We find that...

Open source software (OSS) is a public good. A self-interested individual would consider providing such software, if the benefits he gained from having it justified the cost of programming. Nevertheless each agent is tempted to free ride and wait for others to develop the software instead. This...

We study how the distribution of income among members of society, and income inequality in particular, affects social willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental public goods. We find that social WTP for environmental goods increases with mean income, and decreases (increases) with income...

We augment the standard cartel formation game from non-cooperative coalition theory, often applied in the context of international environmental agreements on climate change, with the possibility that singletons support coalition formation without becoming coalition members themselves. Rather,...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

We study in the laboratory the impact of private information revelation on the selection of partners when forming individual networks. Our experiment combines a "network game" and a "public-good game". In the network game, individuals decide with whom to form a link with, while in the...

While there are various definitions of public goods, the property of joint consumability has become the main or sole defining characteristic of such goods. Among the other characteristics the property of non-excludability is the one primarily discussed. While it is common in the literature to...