"Institutional approaches to social dilemmas have so far focused on how to create incentive structures that channel individuals' behavior into socially desirable outcomes assuming that everyone is selfish. However, the presumption of universal selfishness is not only empirically invalid but may...

Subsequently published as:"Incorporating Motivational Heterogeneity into Game Theoretic Models of Collective Action." Public Choice, 117, 2003, 295-315."Understanding cooperation in the context of social dilemma games is fundamental to understanding how alternative institutional arrangements may...

We conduct a field experiment on conflict in swimming pools. When all lanes are occupied, an actor joins the least crowded lane and asks one of the swimmers to move to another lane. The lane represents a contested scarce resource. We vary the actor’s valuation (high and low) for the good...

We study the evolution of employment and wage outcomes in Chinese SOEs during the first decade of economic reforms, studying a panel of data for almost 1000 enterprises covering the years 1980-90. Despite the consensus on the persistence of labor redundancy in the SOE sector, we find that...

We examine the contrast in the experience of ownership reforms between urban SOEs and rural TVEs using a panel of industrial enterprises in Nanjing municipality for the period from 1994 to 2001. Our objectives are twofold. First, we study how the reform program of “grasp the large and let go...

We measure productivity in leading edge economic research by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) for a sample of 21 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Publications in ten top journals of economics from 1980 to 1998 are taken as the research...

Theory predicts that efficiency prevails on credence goods markets if customers are able to verify which quality they receive from an expert seller. In a series of experiments with endogenous prices we observe that verifiability fails to result in efficient provision behaviour and leads to very...

This article deals with the stability and growth pact the EU??s heads of state or government approved in Amsterdam in June 1997. The pact??s aim is to provide budgetary discipline in Stage 3 of European Monetary Union in order to ensure a stable common currency and the European Central Bank??s...