We examine the effect of introducing Knightian uncertainty into a simple model of public good provision. We find that uncertainty may reduce the free-rider problem if utility is concave in public goods or there are decreasing returns to scale in the production of public goods. It is possible...

This paper considers a model of voluntary public good provision with two players and convex costs. I demonstrate that the provision of public good is higher in the sequential framework under fairly general conditions. This outcome shows that introducing convex costs may reverse under some...

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

There are significant policy issues surrounding Kenya's economic data production, specifically the scope, timeliness, extent, and specificity of data produced by Kenya's statistical agency, and how economic policymakers treat the importance of this public good. Increasing the scope, timeliness,...

Experiments involving multiple public goods with contribution thresholds capture many features of charitable giving environments in which donors try to coordinate their contributions across various potential recipients. We present results from a laboratory experiment that introduces endowment...

Experimental studies have modeled individual funding of social projects as contributions to a threshold public good. We examine donors' behavior when they face multiple threshold public goods and the possibility of coordinating their contributions via an intermediary. Employing the experimental...

This paper is a single-project meta-analysis of four experiments that first model charitable giving as individual contributions to a multiplicity of competing threshold public goods. Given the centrality of the coordination dilemma as the number of recipients increases, we pool 15,936...

The paper discusses the economic effects of misallocation of public expenditures in favor of private goods rather than public goods. It first lays out certain key hypotheses regarding the consequences of the apparent public sector allocation inefficiency and the factors that explain this...