Cursed beliefs with common-value public goods

Instrumenting Beliefs in Threshold Public Goods.

Understanding the causal impact of beliefs on contributions in Threshold Public Goods (TPGs) is particularly important since the social optimum can be supported as a Nash Equilibrium and best-response contributions are a function of beliefs. Unfortunately, investigations of the impact of beliefs on behavior are plagued with endogeneity concerns. We create a set of instruments by cleanly and exo...

Public Goods , Social Norms and Naive Beliefs ∗

An individual’s contribution to a public good may be seen by others as a signal of attributes such as generosity or wealth. An individual may, therefore, choose their contribution so as to send an appropriate signal to others. In this paper we question how the inferences made by others will influence the amount contributed to the public good. Evidence suggests that individuals are naive and bia...

Gender Beliefs and Cooperation in a Public Goods Game

This paper identifies gender beliefs in a public goods game and studies their impact on cooperation. On average, the beliefs of men, but not those of women, depend significantly on the group gender composition, with men expecting groups to be more cooperative when more females are present in the group. Gender beliefs of women are not absent, however, but show more variance than those of men. Th...

Voting for Public Goods with

Public Goods

We require an economic system to cater to individual wants to the maximum possible extent expressed formally by means of an efficiency condition. Because the set of efficient outcomes is a function of individual preferences, a successful system must elicit information about those preferences. That desideratum, along with the fact that the information disclosed by an individual will be dictated ...