It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a...

This paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two parties that produce impure public goods. We show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors, the parties' valuations of the goods produced, and the degree of impurity of these goods. When the degree of...

This paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two parties that produce impure public goods. We show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors, the parties' valuations of the goods produced, and the degree of impurity of these goods. When the degree of...

In randomized control laboratory experiments, we find that those primed to think about markets exhibit more trusting behavior. We randomly and unconsciously prime experimental participants to think about markets and trade. We then ask them to play a trust game involving an anonymous stranger. We...

This paper builds on an analytical tool for studying entrepreneurship in a new classical general equilibrium framework. The entrepreneurial economy model takes the consumer-producer economy model and makes explicit the role of the entrepreneur. This paper uses it to study entrepreneurial...

Established already in the Biblical times, the Matthew effect stands for the fact that in societies rich tend to get richer and the potent even more powerful. Here we investigate a game theoretical model describing the evolution of cooperation on structured populations where the distribution of...

Holländer (1990) argued that when non-monetary social approval from peers is sufficiently valuable, it works to promote cooperation. Holländer, however, did not define the characteristics of environments in which high valued approval is likely to occur. This paper provides evidence from a...

The efficiency of institutionalized punishment is studied by evaluating the stationary states in the spatial public goods game comprising unconditional defectors, cooperators, and cooperating pool-punishers as the three competing strategies. Fine and cost of pool-punishment are considered as the...

We study the evolution of cooperation in public goods games on the square lattice, focusing on the effects that are brought about by different sizes of groups where individuals collect their payoffs and search for potential strategy donors. We find that increasing the group size does not...

The paper explores organizations designed to influence a group to choose specific alternatives from a set of possible choices. The perspective is that of an administrator that has personal objectives not shared by the group and can dictate organization but not group choice. The design works...