Sociality as a Natural Mechanism of Public Goods Provision
نویسندگان
چکیده
In the recent literature, several hypotheses have been offered to explain patterns of human behavior in social environments. In particular, these patterns include 'prosocial' ones, such as fairness, cooperation, and collective good provision. Psychologists suggest that these prosocial behaviors are driven not by miscalculations, but by salience of social identity, in-group favoritism, emotion, or evolutionary adaptations. This paper imports psychology scholarship into an economic model and results in a sustainable solution to collective action problems without any external enforcement mechanisms. This natural mechanism of public goods provision is created, analyzed, and observed in a controlled laboratory environment using experimental techniques.
منابع مشابه
Impact of Short Social Training on Prosocial Behaviors: An fMRI Study
Efficient brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are in need of knowledge about the human brain and how it interacts, plays games, and socializes with other brains. A breakthrough can be achieved by revealing the microfoundations of sociality, an additional component of the utility function reflecting the value of contributing to group success derived from social identity. Building upon our previous ...
متن کاملA general model of the public goods dilemma.
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favours individual contribution to public good [corrected] only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio, parasite virulence, microbial metabolism, punishment of noncooperators, and nearly all aspects of sociality have been analysed as public goods sh...
متن کاملThe Provision of Public Goods in an Economy with Ethnic Divisions∗
Many observers have argued that ethnic divisions make public goods more difficult to provide. This paper examines the provision of public goods in an economy with ethnic divisions. Households feel altruistically toward other households in their ethnic group. The amount of public goods in private contribution equilibrium is generally in decreasing in the amount of ethnic diversity. Public goods ...
متن کاملOptimal Income Taxation, Public-Goods Provision and Public-Sector Pricing: A Contribution to the Foundations of Public Economics
The paper develops an integrated model of optimal nonlinear income taxation, public-goods provision and pricing in a large economy. With asymmetric information about labour productivities and publicgoods preferences, the multidimensional mechanism design problem becomes tractable by requiring renegotiation proofness of the final allocation of private goods and admission tickets for excludable p...
متن کاملEthnic Heterogeneity and the Private Provision of Public Goods
Theoretically, more ethnic heterogeneity may lead to higher aggregate provision of privately provided public goods if ethnic heterogeneity increases the uncertainty about the aggregate level of public good provision. Empirical results in this article, which are based on household survey data from Kampala, Uganda, show robust evidence that an increase in ethnic heterogeneity is associated with a...
متن کامل