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Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Economic Theory
Deciding For Others: Local Public Good Contributions With Intermediaries, Andrej Angelovski, Praveen Kujal, Christos Mavridis
Deciding For Others: Local Public Good Contributions With Intermediaries, Andrej Angelovski, Praveen Kujal, Christos Mavridis
ESI Working Papers
Given the prevalence of local public goods, whose broader use is often limited by distance and borders, we propose a potential solution to the free-riding problem by having each participant/beneficiary delegate the public good contribution decision to a non-local intermediary who neither puts in own endowment into the public good nor benefits from it. Intermediaries make decisions under two compensation mechanisms where the incentives for the intermediary are either non-aligned (fixed) or aligned (variable) with those of the beneficiary. We find that the use of intermediaries, regardless of whether their compensation is aligned or not with that of the beneficiary, …
Centrality And Cooperation In Networks, Boris Van Leeuwen, Abhijit Ramalingam, David Rojo Arjona, Arthur Schram
Centrality And Cooperation In Networks, Boris Van Leeuwen, Abhijit Ramalingam, David Rojo Arjona, Arthur Schram
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
We investigate the effects of centrality on cooperation in groups. Players with centrality keep a group together by having a pivotal position in a network. In some of our experimental treatments, players can vote to exclude others and prevent them from further participation in the group. We find that, in the presence of exclusion, central players contribute significantly less than others, and that this is tolerated by those others. Because of this tolerance, teams with centrality manage to maintain high levels of cooperation.
Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin
Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin
ESI Publications
This paper describes a simple model of how a ruler’s religious identity affects public goods provision. Our primary insight is that rulers reduce public goods expenditures to a greater degree when there are privately-provided substitutes excludable by religion.The basic idea is that if the good is provided privately to the ruler’s co-religionists, the ruler faces weaker incentives to provide this public good because his co-religionists receive lower marginal utility from its provision. Testing such a conjecture is an empirical challenge, however, since the religious identity of rulers rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting …
The Impact Of Social Information On The Voluntary Provision Of Public Goods: A Replication Study, James J. Murphy, Nomin Batmunkh, Ben Nilson, Samantha Ray
The Impact Of Social Information On The Voluntary Provision Of Public Goods: A Replication Study, James J. Murphy, Nomin Batmunkh, Ben Nilson, Samantha Ray
ESI Working Papers
Shang and Croson (2009) found that providing information about the donation decisions of others can have a positive impact on individual donations to public radio. In this study, we attempted to replicate their results, however, we found no evidence of that social comparisons affected donation decisions. Most of our donors were renewing members, a group which Shang and Croson also found were not influenced by social information.
Sharing As Risk Pooling In A Social Dilemma Experiment, Todd L. Cherry, E. Lance Howe, James J. Murphy
Sharing As Risk Pooling In A Social Dilemma Experiment, Todd L. Cherry, E. Lance Howe, James J. Murphy
ESI Working Papers
In rural economies with missing or incomplete markets, idiosyncratic risk is frequently pooled through informal networks. Idiosyncratic shocks, however, are not limited to private goods but can also restrict an individual from partaking in or benefiting from a collective activity. In these situations, a group must decide whether to provide insurance to the affected member. In this paper, we describe results of a laboratory experiment designed to test whether a simple sharing institution can sustain risk pooling in a social dilemma with idiosyncratic risk. We test whether risk can be pooled without a commitment device and, separately, whether effective risk …
Advancing The Understanding Of Behavior In Social-Ecological Systems: Results From Lab And Field Experiments, Marco A. Janssen, Therese Lindahl, James J. Murphy
Advancing The Understanding Of Behavior In Social-Ecological Systems: Results From Lab And Field Experiments, Marco A. Janssen, Therese Lindahl, James J. Murphy
ESI Publications
"Experiments have made important contributions to our understanding of human behavior, including behavior relevant for understanding social-ecological systems. When there is a conflict between individual and group interests in social-ecological systems, social dilemmas occur. From the many types of social-dilemma formulations that are used to study collective action, common-pool resource and public-good dilemmas are most relevant for social-ecological systems. Experimental studies of both common-pool resource and public-good dilemmas have shown that many predictions based on the conventional theory of collective action, which assumes rational, self-interested behavior, do not hold. More cooperation occurs than predicted (Ledyard 1995), “cheap talk” increases cooperation …
Cost Share Adjustment Processes For Cooperative Group Decisions About Shared Goods: A Design Approach, Edna T. Loehman, Richard Kiser, Stephen Rassenti
Cost Share Adjustment Processes For Cooperative Group Decisions About Shared Goods: A Design Approach, Edna T. Loehman, Richard Kiser, Stephen Rassenti
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
For group decision about shared goods, the nature of the shared good and how its cost is to be shared among group members must be determined. Complexity arises from heterogeneity in preferences and endowments and nonlinear cost. To facilitate group decision, this paper proposes special type of group decision support system, a cost share adjustment process (CSAP), in which cost shares are adjusted iteratively via algorithmic rules until unanimity is reached, ideally producing a socially optimal, cost feasible, and fair outcome. In contrast to public good literature, our designs apply for situations of nonlinear cost, with economies of scale and …
Divided Loyalists Or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus About Cooperation In Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas, Matthew W. Mccarter, Anya Samek, Roman M. Sheremeta
Divided Loyalists Or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus About Cooperation In Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas, Matthew W. Mccarter, Anya Samek, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Publications
The current social dilemma literature lacks theoretical consensus regarding how individuals behave when facing multiple simultaneous social dilemmas. The divided-loyalty hypothesis, from organizational theory, predicts that cooperation will decline as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. The conditional-cooperation hypothesis, from behavioral economics, predicts that cooperation will increase as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. We employ a laboratory experiment to create consensus between these literatures and find support for the conditional-cooperation hypothesis. The positive effect of interacting with different group members comes from participants having an …
Benefit-Cost Analysis Of Enviromental Projects: A Plethora Of Biases Understating Net Benefits, Philip E. Graves
Benefit-Cost Analysis Of Enviromental Projects: A Plethora Of Biases Understating Net Benefits, Philip E. Graves
PHILIP E GRAVES
There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores sources of bias in the methods used to evaluate environmental policy in the United States, although most of the arguments translate immediately to decision-making in other countries. There are some “big picture” considerations that have gone unrecognized, and there are numerous more minor, yet cumulatively important, technical details that point to potentially large biases against acceptance on benefit-cost …
Nonrivalry And Price Discrimination In Copyright Economics, John P. Conley, Christopher S. Yoo
Nonrivalry And Price Discrimination In Copyright Economics, John P. Conley, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The literature on the economics of copyright proceeds from the premise that copyrightable works constitute pure public goods, which is generally modeled by assuming that such works are nonexcludable and that the marginal cost of making additional copies is essentially zero. A close examination of the foundational literature on public goods theory reveals that the defining characteristic of public goods is instead the optimality criterion known as the “Samuelson condition,” which implies that the systematic bias toward underproduction is the result of the inability to induce consumers to reveal their preferences rather than the inability to exclude or price at …