We introduce democratic mechanisms where individual utilities are not observable by other people at the legislative stage. We show that the combination of three rules can yield e±cient provision of public projects: first, flexible and double majority rules where the size of the majority depends...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of deep uncertainty about the benefits of the public good, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private information....

We introduce democratic mechanisms where individual utilities are not observable by other people at the legislative stage. We show that the combination of three rules can yield efficient provision of public projects: First, flexible and double majority rules where the size of the majority...

School vouchers may increase the competition public school districts face. Greater competition may spur public schools to improve student outcomes, which reliably predict labor market productivity and earnings. Previous school competition studies do not use spatial statistics; they fail to...

The Kyoto summit initiated an international game of cap and trade. Unlike a national policy, the essence of this game is the self-selection of national emission targets. This differs from the standard global public-goods game because targets are met in the context of a global carbon market. This...

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...

We set up a general model on capital mobility which contains many of the models in the literature as special cases. The race to the bottom results not from a capital flight effect, but rather from a kind of Laffer curve effect in public good provision. Selectively introducing simplifying...

Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remaining firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences of five rounds of a twoperson public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence, subjects can select a new partner out of six...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians' behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We...