This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities, and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrat...

We analyze important forces that hamper the formation of successful self-enforcing agreements to mitigate global warming. The analysis combines two modules: a) a computable general equilibrium model that captures the feedback between the economy, environmental damages and the climate system and b) a game theoretic model that determines stable coalitions in the presence of free-riding incentives...

This paper describes and implements a method for estimating the average marginal value of a time-varying local public good: air quality. It uses the General Social Survey (GSS), which asks thousands of people in various U.S. locations how happy they are, along with other demographic and attitude questions. These data are matched with the Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality System (AQS...

7 While many experiments demonstrate that behavior differs from the predictions of traditional economic 8 theory, they have not shown that economic reasoning is necessarily incorrect. Instead, these experiments 9 illustrate that the preferences of homo economicus have been mis-specified. Modeled with social preferences, 10 it may be rational for agents to forego material gains. Social dilemmas ...

We analyze important forces that hamper the formation of successful self-enforcing agreements to mitigate global warming. The analysis combines two modules: a) an integrated assessment model that captures the feedback between the economy, environmental damages and the climate system and b) a game theoretic model that determines stable coalitions in the presence of free-riding incentives. We con...

Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility Society’s demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the “psychology and economics” of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which reflects a complex interplay of genuine altruism, soc...

European Asylum Policy Policy towards asylum seekers has been a controversial topic for more than a decade. Rising numbers of asylum applications have been met with ever-tougher policies to deter them. Following a period of policy harmonisation, the EU has reached a crucial stage in the development of a new Common European Asylum System. This paper seeks to shed light on what form this should t...

Blood Donations and Incentives: Evidence from a Field Experiment There is a longstanding concern that material incentives might undermine prosocial motivation, leading to a decrease in blood donations rather than an increase. This paper provides an empirical test of how material incentives affect blood donations in a large-scale field experiment spanning three months and involving more than 10,...

When subjects can make non-binding announcements of possible contributions to a public good numerically, there is no effect on average level of contributions in a public goods experiment relative to play without announcements. But a detailed analysis of this experiment shows that pre-play announcements increased the variance of achieved cooperation among groups, leading both to more highly coop...

We report on a design of a Turing tournament and its initial implementation to learning in repeated 2 person games. The principal objectives of the tournament, named after the original Turing Test, are (1) to find learning algorithms (emulators) that most closely simulate human behavior, (2) to find algorithms (detectors) that most accurately distinguish between humans and machines, and (3) to ...