Traffic congestion is a substantial time cost for many urban commuters. This paper studies the response of subjects in an experimental setting in which subjects choose between a short direct route that becomes increasingly congested as more people travel on it and a more indirect route that does...

The Bush Administration followed its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in March, 2001, by a February, 2002 proposal for unilateral action to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions. The February proposal has been widely criticized for having little content and no teeth. The lack of teeth is clearly...

Economists interested in the interaction between trade, politics and the environ-ment have restricted their attention almost exclusively to the problem of production related—“smokestackâ€â€”pollution. We instead consider consumption...

We explore the effects of social distance on reciprocal behavior in an experiment conducted over the Internet on three continents and in classroom laboratory sessions conducted in Israel and Spain. Our design elicits individual behavior profiles over a range of contingencies, enabling us to...

Over the period 1997 to 2000, the Australian government introduced two waves of price subsidies, then liberalised regulation to encourage private health insurance. Most of the increase in coverage occurred after the liberalization. Thus, it appears that this policy change rather than the earlier...

Women may want greater taxes and redistributional spending than men if malein comes exceed female incomes and men and women are not always married. Cross-section evidence from opinion polls provides indirect support for this view.Women express greater favorability toward redistributional...

We test whether promises per se are effective in enhancing cooperative behavior in a form of trust game. In a new treatment, rather than permitting free-form messages, we instead allow only a bare promise-only message to be sent (or not). We find that bare promises are much less effective in...

Exclusive contracts assign to certain physicians the right and duty to provide all services covered by the contract. All other physicians are foreclosed from providing these services. Many physicians have brought legal complaints alleging that their exclusion constitutes an exclusive contracts...