Relying upon voluntary contributions for public goods provision generally results in the under-provision of the good relative to first-best levels due to the free-rider problem. Taxation/allocation schemes have been designed which solve the free-rider problem, but are too complex to implement....

The work of Friedrich Von Hayek contains several testable predictions about the nature of market processes. Vernon Smith termed the most important one the ‘Hayek hypothesis’: equilibrium prices and the gains from trade can be achieved in the presence of diffuse, decentralized information,...

Coordination games have become a critical tool of analysis in fields such as development and institutional economics. Understanding behavior in coordination games is an important step towards understanding the differing success of teams, firms and nations. This paper investigates the...

Over 25% of the US population volunteers. Clary et al. (1998) devised a survey that identifies a volunteer’s primary motive for volunteering. We investigate the effect of tailoring the communications that volunteers receive from their organizations (e.g., printed newsletters, update emails) to...

The work of Friedrich Von Hayek contains several testable predictions about the nature of market processes. Vernon Smith termed the most important one the ‘Hayek hypothesis’: the gains from trade can be realized in the presence of diffuse, decentralized information, and in the absence of...

The coronavirus is causing considerable damage to the global economy, and the potential damage is continuing to grow. Unlike many other crises, evaluating the economic impact of the coronavirus is extremely challenging, due to the complexity of the ways in which it affects economic activity....

Several scholars have argued that abundant natural resources can be harmful to economic performance under bad institutions and helpful when institutions are good. These arguments have either been theoretical or based on naturally-occurring variation in natural resource wealth. We test this...

According to the identifiability effect, people will donate more to a single beneficiary rather than to many beneficiaries, holding constant what the donations are actually used for. We test the identifiability effect for two novel subject pools (the suppliers and beneficiaries of volunteer...

Many studies have looked at how individual player traits influence individual choice in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma, but few studies have looked at how the average traits of pairs of players influence the average choices of pairs. We consider cognitive ability, patience, risk tolerance,...

Five years after its inception, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) single market is malfunctioning in a litany of ways: there remain restrictions on the movement of goods, capital and labor across political boundaries. This paper describes the GCC single market’s malfunctions. We also propose...