We examine three noncooperative “global warming games” where carbon dioxide emissions and transfers are determined. An international agency implements transfers from rich to poor nations. In each game, the transfer mechanism obeys a predetermined equity principle – horizontal, proportional or “green GNP.” Participation in each transfer scheme is voluntary. We find that implementable horizontal ...

Daylight savings time (DST) represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of the transitions on life satisfaction. Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germ...

The law of the few refers to the following empirical phenomenon: in social groups a very small subset of individuals invests in collecting information while the rest of the group invests in forming connections with this select few. In many instances, there are no observable differences in characteristics between those who invest in information and those who invest in forming connections. This p...

The herein study presents an explanation of the high frequency of team production and high level of peer monitoring found in Japanese firms, in terms of a simple and empirically grounded variation in individual utility functions. We argue that Japanese agents are generally characterized by a higher degree, with respect to their Western counterparts, of aversion to unfavourable inequality, a fea...

Norm Enforcement in Social Dilemmas: An Experiment with Police Commissioners Do individuals trained in law enforcement punish or reward differently from typical student subjects? We analyze norm enforcement behavior of newly appointed police commissioners in both a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism game and a Common Pool Resource game. Our experimental design includes treatments where a reward o...

We consider a Tiebout economy with di®erential crowding and public projects in which agents are distinguished by their tastes and genetic endowments. Agents choose which crowding characteristic, for example, skill, they wish to express, and this a®ects their value to other members of their jurisdiction, club, ̄rm, etc. An agent's choice is in°uenced both by his genetic endowment, which a®ects h...

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct a laboratory experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field and allows us to study the behavioral logic of social interaction effects. Our novel design feature is that each subject is simultaneously a member of two randoml...

This paper utilizes laboratory and field experiments to test the use of a provision point mechanism to finance renewable energy programs, commonly known as green pricing programs. The mechanism solicits discrete contributions towards a provision threshold using a money-back guarantee for insufficient contributions and extended benefits for contributions in excess of the threshold. In the labora...

Monetary incentives are often considered as a way to foster contributions to public goods in society and firms. This paper investigates experimentally the effect of monetary incentives in the presence of a norm enforcement mechanism. Norm enforcement through peer punishment has been shown to be effective in raising contributions by itself. We test whether and how monetary incentives interact wi...

The way people form groups when facing a coordination problem poses an interesting question. This paper addresses the issue of what type of clubs are formed when players must play a public goods game with the other players belonging to their club. I use a two-stage approach to separate network decisions and public goods decisions and apply farsighted stability to characterize the network struct...