Klimawandel, Verknappung der Ressourcen, peak oil, die Sorge um unsere Lebensgrundlagen und deren Erhaltung und die Notwendigkeit zur Energiewende, sind Themen, die die Transition Town Initiativen antreiben, auf eine Veränderung der bisherigen ressourcen- und energieintensiven Lebens- und...

This essay explores the legacy of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock as it pertains to the establishment of public choice as a field of scholarly inquiry. The Calculus of Consent is surely the Ur-text for capturing that legacy, yet that legacy can be discerned in two distinct directions. One...

Collaborative consumption takes many forms, including car sharing, community gardens, credit unions and toy libraries. While these phenomena are arguably reshaping the marketplace, to this point, we lack a way to harmonize these diverse systems under a single umbrella or to connect them to prior...

Preserving global public goods, such as the planet's ecosystem, depends on large-scale cooperation, which is difficult to achieve because the standard reciprocity mechanisms weaken in large groups. Here we demonstrate a method by which reciprocity can maintain cooperation in a large-scale public...

This paper examines the usefulness of Coasian Transaction Cost Economics for describing the governance outcomes for semi-public markets, i.e. markets where some government involvement is indispensable, and where the government transacts with private parties, or provides the service in-house....

Castilian Abstract: En este documento se argumenta que muchas de las prescripciones de política económica para promover el crecimiento y lograr el desarrollo tienden a ser divergentes porque usan en el fondo diferentes sistemas de valoración moral. Esto sucede porque la economía no puede...

We examine the formation of multilateral, hub-and-spoke and bilateral international R&D strategic alliances (overlapping climate clubs) to reduce CO2 emissions. R&D provision in clubs produces two types of positive externalities: a global public good (i.e., reduction of CO2 emissions) and...

After a period of neoliberal blind faith in the power of economic self-interest and of austerity to tackle its catastrophic effects, we are re-discovering our more pleasant sides. There is currently a surge of interest in sharing – in research in various developmental sciences, in popular...

This is a review article of The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, edited by Roger Congleton, Bernard Grofman, and Stefan Voigt. This two-volume collection has 90 chapters, with each chapter averaging 20.4 pages (excluding the volumes' indexes). My subtitle conveys my judgment of this work. The...