How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social...

The main question addressed in this paper is how the great variation in the level of social trust in different countries can be explained. Most empirical research on this question has been based on survey data which has limitations when it comes to capturing the causal mechanisms. Building on...

We examine the formation of multilateral, hub-and-spoke and bilateral international R&D strategic alliances (overlapping climate clubs) to reduce CO2 emissions. R&D provision in clubs produces two types of positive externalities: a global public good (i.e., reduction of CO2 emissions) and...

The usual, official approach to Olympic and Paralympic results is nonsense from the collective point of view. A rearrangement using all medals gained by each nation provides new rankings which can be linked to two compelling factors, population (nature) and income (nurture)

We analyse two team settings in which one member in a team has stronger incentives to contribute than the others. If contributions constitute a sacrifice for the strong player, the other team members are more inclined to cooperate than if contributions are strictly dominant for the strong...

When multiple charities, social programs and community projects simultaneously vie for funding, donors risk miscoordinating their contributions leading to an inefficient distribution of funding across projects. Community chests and other intermediary organizations facilitate coordination among...

When multiple charities, social programs and community projects simultaneously vie for funding, donors risk miscoordinating their contributions leading to an inefficient distribution of funding across projects. Community chests and other intermediary organizations facilitate coordination among...

When multiple charities, social programs and community projects simultaneously vie for funding, donors risk miscoordinating their contributions leading to an inefficient distribution of funding across projects. Community chests and other intermediary organizations facilitate coordination among...

Standard public goods games often assign group members the same marginal per capita returns to public goods production, but in reality group members facing differential individual returns often must collaborate to produce a public good. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate the...