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...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

We set out and solve a static neoclassical model with a labor/leisure choice for agents and a government sector producing a Samuelsonian public good. Numerical solutions vary considerably with the elasticity of substitution for commodities in an agent's utility function. We focus on solutions...

A framework is proposed to subsume public goods and common-pool resources, respectively, as specific cases of positive and negative externalities. A pure public good is a positive externality whose appropriable benefits are too small or too uncertain relative to the high private cost for anyone...

We propose a simple mechanism that might improve voluntary contributions to public goods. Using a laboratory experiment we analyze how bundling public with private goods affects individuals’ valuations for both goods. In the experiment, subjects may purchase a private and a public good either...

The paper formulates a piecewise linearized version of the procedure developed by Sato (1983) and analyzes its properties. In so doing, Fujigaki’s (1981) private goods economy is extended to involve a public good; and the intertemporal game of Champsaur and Laroque is piecewise localized by...

This paper investigates the private provision of public goods in segregated societies. While most research agrees that segregation undermines public provision, the findings are mixed for private provision: social interactions, being strong within groups and limited across groups, may either...

Recent experimental research has examined whether contributions to public goods can be traced back to intuitive or deliberative decision-making, using response times in public good games in order to identify the specific decision process at work. In light of conflicting results, this paper...

We study the classical free-rider problem in public goods provision in a large economy with uncertainty about the average valuation of the public good. Individual preferences over public goods are shaped by a skill and a taste parameter. We use a mechanism design approach to solve for the...

In this paper, the author analyzes the behavior of local governments in capital taxation when the financial choices in terms of the quality of public goods are made done by a central planner. More specifically, he asks the question of whether a local government has an interest in taxing the...