Besley and Ghatak (2001) show that public good should be owned by the agent who values the public good most — irrespective of technological factors. In this paper we relax their assumptions in a natural way by allowing the agents to be indispensable and show that relative valuations are not...

A community faces the obligation of providing an indivisible public good. Each member is capable of providing it at a certain cost and the solution is to rely on the player who can do it at the lowest cost. It is then natural that he or she be compensated by the other players. The question is to...

The siting of public facilities such as prisons or waste disposal facilities typically faces rejection by local populations (the "NIMBY" syndrome, for Not In My BackYard). These public goods exhibit a private bad aspect creating an asymmetry: all involved communities benefit from their...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of activism in determining the identity of the “green” median voter and the influence of the green voter on environmental regulatory stringency in the US states. Design/methodology/approach – Regulatory stringency is measured...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine what the significant contributions to the intergenerational equity and social discount rate (SDR) literature have been over recent decades and presents what policy progress has been made as a result. Design/methodology/approach The approach has...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze economically several versions of the philosophical common good in order to contribute to the search for a viable conceptualization of the common good. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents an economic analysis of the common good by...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on conditional cooperation and investigate whether the difference in contributions between Partners and Strangers designs in linear public goods experiments can be explained by differences in beliefs. Design/methodology/approach – The author...

Purpose – The study attempts to look into the poverty and deprivation in slums across various social and religious groups and its bearing on the children. It not only analyses income poverty but also looks at derivation of access to basic services including water, sanitation and drainage. The...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking "others' behaviour" a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...