In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the provider of infrastructure are the recognition of the economic and political importance of infrastructure for development, and the faith that government ...

We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay of contributions in standard public goods games cannot be fully explained by reinforcement learning....

Existing research has shown that highly diverse countries tend to provide less public goods. This article argues, by contrast, that the relationship is spurious: both contemporary ethnic heterogeneity and low public goods provision represent legacies of a weakly developed state capacity inherited from the past. Classical theories of state formation are then tested to show that favorable topogra...

We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay of contributions in standard public goods games cannot be fully explained by reinforcement learning....

Religious Minorities and Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Rural West Bengal Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India concentration of religi...

Economic games such as the public goods game are increasingly being used to measure social behaviours in humans and non-human primates. The results of such games have been used to argue that people are pro-social, and that humans are uniquely altruistic, willingly sacrificing their own welfare in order to benefit others. However, an alternative explanation for the empirical observations is that...

Bergstrom showed that a necessary condition for a Pareto optimum with non-paternalistic altruism is classification as a selfish Pareto optimum. This paper shows that Bergstrom’s result does not generalize to the benefit-cost analysis of generic changes in public goods. There may exist good projects that will be rejected by a selfish-benefit cost test, a selfish test error. Selfish test error is...