This paper studies public good provision in the laboratory using voluntary contribution mechanism, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan.

Greenhouse gas abatement is a public good, so climate policy is a public-goods game and suffers from the free-rider incentives that make the outcome of such games notoriously uncooperative. Adopting an international agreement can change the nature of the game, reducing or exacerbating the...

This article experimentally examines voluntary contributions when group members’ marginal returns to the public good vary. The experiment implements two marginal return types, low and high, and uses the information that members have about the heterogeneity to identify the applied contribution...

We study how an optimal income tax and an optimal public-goods provision rule respond to preference and productivity shocks. A conventional Mirrleesian treatment is shown to provoke manipulations of the policy mechanism by individuals with similar interests. We therefore extend the Mirrleesian...

Provides empirical evidence of significant lack of relevant knowledge of some public goods and experiential commodities. It also analyses whether information provision about the attributes or characteristics of commodities is likely to result in individuals’ finding their ‘true’...

The paper examines the relationship between globalization and public administration through economic theory principles and an example. Starting from the consideration of early concerns about globalization, it argues that although the size of government has rarely declined, its power has been...

Belief elicitation is an important methodological issue for experimental economists. There are two generic questions: 1) Do incentives increase belief accuracy? 2) Are there interaction effects of beliefs and decisions? We investigate these questions in the case of finitely repeated public goods...

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of...

This paper investigates a simultaneous discrete public good provision game with incomplete information. To use the terminology of Admati and Perry (1991), we consider both contribution and subscription games. In the former, contributions are not refunded if the project is not completed, while in...

Migration raises a potential free rider problem for the provision of durable local public goods if the late-comers can enjoy the public good without paying for it. Allowing communities to finance public goods by debt mitigates this problem, since future immigrants have to share the burden of the...