We present a model of altruistically-minded– yet rational– players contributing to a public good. A key feature is the tension between altruism and crowding-out effects. We present three main results: (1) More altruistic behaviour often reduces social welfare; (2) It is almost always optimal for a player to act more selfishly than her true preference; (3) A player’s optimal altruistic commitmen...

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field data, e.g. with respect to partisan preferences on unemployment and inflation or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy. We emphasize tha...

BACKGROUND Home-based models of hospice and palliative care are promoted with the argument that most people prefer to die at home. We examined the heterogeneity in preferences for home death and explored, for the first time, changes of preference with illness progression. METHODS We searched for studies on adult preferences for place of care at the end of life or place of death in MEDLINE (19...

Introduction Implicit attitudes are preferences that exist outside of conscious awareness or conscious control. Recent evidence demonstrates that these preferences are variably related to selfreported (explicit) measures of preference. For example, Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald (in press; Group Dynamics) showed that correspondence between implicit and explicit measures partially depends on the tar...

1 1 The authors thank the Indian Statistical Institute at New Delhi and the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Maastricht for their hospitality. Thanks are also due to Lars Ehlers, Ton Storcken, and the anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. Public good economies where agents are endowed with strictly convex continuous single-peaked preferences on a conve...

Much of the literature on distributive preferences covers specific considerations in isolation, and recent reviews have suggested that research is required to inform on the relative importance of various key considerations. Responding to this research recommendation, we explore the distributive preferences of the general public using a set of generic social value judgments. We report on a discr...

Different theories about the impact of aid make distinct predictions about citizens’ attitudes toward foreign aid in recipient countries. We investigate their preferences toward aid and government projects in order to examine these different theories. Are citizens indifferent between development projects funded by their own government or by foreign aid donors? To address this, in an experiment ...

In this article, I investigate how political information affects voting behavior. Specifically, I test (i) if more informed voters are more likely to vote for their closest politicians; and (ii) if this translates into a bias on the aggregate level. To do so, I use a set of Swedish individual survey data on the preferences for local public services of both politicians and voters, which provides...

Mobile telephone conversations in public places are often annoying to bystanders. Previous work has focused on the psychological and social causes for this (Monk 2004b, Ling 2004), but has not examined the possible role of properties of the communication channel. We hypothesized that some of the annoyance could be explained if bystander preferences differ from talker preferences. If this is thi...

The paper studies the design of inter-governmental transfers when redistribution is e¤ected through the public provision of a private good (education) by local government agents. The central government does not necessarily have the same preferences as the local agents regarding the relative welfare of poor and non-poor individuals, but must rely on them to implement public spending decisions. T...