We study the classical free-rider problem in public goods provision in a large economy with uncertainty about the average valuation of the public good. Individual preferences over public goods are shaped by a skill and a taste parameter. We use a mechanism design approach to solve for the...

The emergence of Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) business models as a successful alternative to conventional uniform pricing brings up new questions related to the task of pricing. We investigate the effect of a reduction of privacy on consumers' purchase decisions (whether to buy, and if so how much...

Previous research has shown that opportunities for two-sided partner choice in finitely repeated social dilemma games can promote cooperation through a combination of sorting and opportunistic signaling, with late period defections by selfish players causing an end-game decline. How such...

To study the persistence of cultural norms that mandate respect towards the elder, we conducted an artefactual field experiment in two cities in Ghana. Using a public good game with third-party punishment, we find that punisher's age is an important determinant of cooperation. Our results...

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 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,...

This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider the church levy, which the Catholic Church in Germany collects as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. We design a randomized field experiment...

We consider a model of local public goods in a random network context. The influence network determines (exogenously) who observes whom every period and comprises a wide array of options depending on the degree distribution and the in/out-degree correlations. We show that there exists a unique...

We develop a model that combines competitive exchange of private commodities across endogenously formed groups with public good provision and global collective decisions. There is a tension between local and global collective decisions. In particular, we show that group formation and collective...

In this experiment, we endogenize the choice of which contribution scheme is implemented in a public goods game. We investigate three rule-based contribution schemes. In a first step, players agree on a common group provision level using the principle of the smallest common denominator....