In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what mightcause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considersan environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of powerand distribution where institutions (the...

This paper explores the feasibility and desirability of CorporateSocial Responsibility (CSR). We identify CSR with creation of publicgoods or curtailment of public bads. Using a model with pro…t-maximizing …firms, the paper shows that there is a direct parallel be-tween CSR and traditional...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation forparticipation in religion and ritual. But if the signal’s cost is too small, freeriders willsend the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitivelycostly. If the average level of...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperationin a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Ourapproach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relieson endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of contributors...

Idiosyncratic risk attitudes are usually assumed to be commonly knownand restricted to own payos. However, the alternatives faced by a decisionmaker often involve risks for others' payos as well. Motivated by theimportance of other-regarding preferences in social interactions, this paperexplores...

We study the effects of leadership on the private provision of a public good when group members are heterogeneously endowed. Leadership is implemented as a sequential public goods game where one group member contributes first and all the others follow. Our results show that the presence of a...

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public goodthat avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is in-creased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the...

We exploit the aggregative structure of the public good modelto provide a simple analysis of the voluntary contribution game. Incontrast to the best response function approach, ours avoids the pro-liferation of dimensions as the number of players is increased, andcan readily analyse games...

This note develops a method of recovering individual preferences, and of obtaining money-metricindividual welfare comparisons, from demand functions generated by Cournot-Nash equilibria ingames with public goods.

We introduce a model of redistributive income taxation and public expenditure. Thisjoint treatment permits analyzing the interdependencies between the two policies: onecannot be chosen independently of the other. Empirical evidence reveals that partisanconfrontation essentially falls on...