We investigate the role of endowment heterogeneity in a local and global public goods setting with multiple group membership and examine the effect of temporal role reversal on cooperation decisions. Subjects can contribute to a global public good which benefits all subjects and two local public...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

We contribute to the literature on private financing of intergenerational public goods, focusing on climate change mitigation. We consider, in a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with environmental externalities, a contract between successive generations, whereby agents of...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...

To reduce a negative externality, socially responsible households can invest responsibly (SRI), consume responsibly (SRC), or do both. Which is better? In a closed microeconomic model with intertwined product and capital markets, we analyze how responsible households should use SRI and SRC to...

We show that a policy of disclosing the ticket sales during a fundraising lottery raises total revenue when there are more than two bettors. The optimal timing of the disclosure is when about half of the players have purchased lottery tickets

The upcoming one-year repeal of the federal estate tax in the U.S. creates an opportunity to reconsider the taxation of wealth transfers. This article argues that if inheritances are included in an optimal tax framework, existing evidence suggests that the ideal wealth transfer tax would be much...

Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences. Controlling for time-varying...

Externalities and social preferences, such as patience and altruism, play a key role in the endogenous choice of social interactions, which in turn affect the diffusion of a pandemic or patterns of social segregation. We build a dynamic model, augmented with an SIR block, in which agents...

We test the importance of social norms for market interactions associated with negative real-world externalities in a large-scale experiment with a heterogeneous population sample from Germany. The majority of experimental participants refuses to trade, thus behaving in a moral way. Our data...