We propose that community aspirations defined as the preferences for goals that increase communal well-being are an important determinant of cooperation in collective action problems. This paper conceptualizes community aspirations and investigates whether the proposed measure is associated with...

We analyze institutional solutions to international cooperation when collective action creates negative externalities and splits the actors into supporters and opponents, all of whom can spend resources toward their preferred outcome. We study how actors can communicate their preferences through...

Under the standard summation technology, pure public goods can be provided via the direct contributions mechanism, even in an arbitrarily large group. However, if the public good exhibits any degree of rivalry, individual consumption of the public good will fall to zero as group size grows...

Social dilemmas are central to human society. Depletion of natural resources, climate protection, security of energy supply, and workplace collaborations are all examples of social dilemmas. Since cooperative behaviour in a social dilemma is individually costly, Nash equilibrium predicts that...

It is shown that altruism does not affect the equilibrium provision of public goods although altruism takes the form of unconditional commitment to contribute. The reason is that altruistic contributions completely crowd out selfish voluntary contributions. That is, egoists free ride on...

We test an assortative mechanism whereby groups are formed endogenously, through the use of voting. Once formed, groups play a public-goods game, where the social value of an incremental contribution to the group account increases with the size of the group. Societies of nine people are...

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...