Comparing Voluntary and Mandatory Gameplay

Comparing Voluntary and Mandatory Gameplay

Play is commonly considered to be a voluntary activity. Game designers generally believe that gameplay is essentially different when play is obligatory. Such a belief may be a challenge for serious games, as instruction is usually mandatory. This article describes the outcomes of two experiments on the impact of voluntariness on the learning effect of a serious game. In the first experiment fre...

Voluntary Audits versus Mandatory Audits

Exploiting a natural experiment in which voluntary audits replace mandatory audits for U.K. private companies, we analyze whether imposing audits suppresses valuable information about the types of companies that would voluntarily choose to be audited. We control for the assurance benefits of auditing to isolate the role signaling plays by focusing on companies that are audited under both regime...

Is routine testing mandatory or voluntary?

Is mandatory voting better than voluntary voting?

We investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models. In a generalized costly voting model, we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large, then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient. Increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participat...

Mandatory Versus Voluntary Disclosure of Product Risks

We analyze amodel in which firms are able to acquire information about product risks and may or may not be required to disclose this information. We initially study the effect of disclosure rules assuming that firms are not liable for the harm caused by their products. Mandatory disclosure is obviously superior to voluntary disclosure given the information about product risks that firms possess...