How can we overcome the existing political, economic, and ecological crises that humanity faces? With the notion of the commons, Lukas Peter argues that this form of social organization can provide answers to the shortcomings of centralized states and open and competitive markets. By building on...

Traditionally, economists make a sharp distinction between stated and revealed preferences, viewing the latter as more fully meeting the assumptions of economic analysis. Here, we consider one form of empirical evidence regarding this belief: the consistency of choices in stated and revealed...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

Quasilinear preferences on a public good and a numeraire good are limits of preferences where both goods are normal. The set of equilibria of the voluntary contribution (or private provision) game is easily characterized under quasilinearity by: top valuators aggregately contribute their common...

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...

This paper proposes a new perspective for studying decentralization by considering it as the unbundling of public goods provision. We define centralization as the bundled provision of public goods from different tiers (national, sub-national or local) by one single provider held accountable by...

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...

This paper examines the questions of who participates in the provision of a public good through the voluntary participation of agents in the presence of strong complementarity between a public good and a private good. We show that the greater the initial endowment of the private good that agents...

In this paper we consider the effect of ambiguity on the private provision of public goods. Equilibrium is shown to exist and be unique. We examine how provision of the public good changes as the size of the population increases. We show that when there is uncertainty there may be less...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...