We consider a pure public goods economy with a continuum of agents. In the standard model, the optimal public good levels will generally be infinitely larger than the private good consumption levels. This does not seem to be a reasonable or even a comprehensible limit of a large economy. We propose instead to model internet and other intellectual content as our canonical public goods. We argue ...

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free-riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a se...

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a se...

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a se...

With the Internet has come the phenomenon of people volunteering to work on digital public goods such as open source software and online encyclopedia articles. Presumably, the success of individual public goods has an effect on attracting volunteers. However, the definition of success is ill-defined. This paper explores the impact of different success metrics on a simple public goods model. The...

In addition to the internal risk of deposition, which is modeled using selectorate politics (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003), leaders risk being deposed by mass political movements such as revolutions. Leaders reward supporters with either public goods, which reward the whole of society, improve economic productivity, and increase the ability of revolutionaries to organize, or private goods. If ...