Duty-orientation implies a warm glow of giving as well as a cold shiver of not giving enough. If duty-oriented consumers learn their moral responsibility by observing others’ behavior, social interaction in contribution behavior arises. However, since moral responsibility is a burden,...

We derive a measure of national income, defined in terms of maximum sustainable per capita consumption. If population and interest rates are constant, the income generated by natural resource extraction is the return on resource wealth, defined as the present value of future resource rents. With...

ABSTRACT. Economic models typically assume that individual wants are determined by forces exogenous to the economic system. Social psychology and consumer research, in contrast, support the view that the perceived benefits of goods and services are strongly affected by endogenously determined...

Without resorting to the folk theorem or to altruistic preferences, we demonstrate that the problem of overharvesting among individually rational harvesters in a local commons vanishes if the harvesters share, and voluntarily contribute to, some public good. Formulating the model as a two-stage...

Governments sometimes try to increase individuals’ contributions to public goods through appeals to consumer responsibility, rather than by economic incentives, for example in recycling campaigns. Using standard consumer theory, one would hardly expect such campaigns to work at all; but if...