Commentary

No abstract available.

We conduct a two-stage game experiment with a non-excludable public good. In the first stage, two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good. In the second stage, knowing the other subject’s commitment decision, subjects who did not commit in the first stage choose contributions to the public good. We found no support for the ...

This paper suggests that stabilizing federalism is like solving a public good provision problem. It reviews results in the public good provision literature that are relevant for federalism, and discusses the implications of these results for the institutional design of federalism. 1For useful feedback, I thank seminar participants at Washington University, Duke, and Michigan. Federalism now rea...

This paper studies how the level of the public good and the amounts of taxes are determined in a bargaining model. Using the Nash bargaining solution as the solution concept, the paper shows that the nature of individuals’ preferences over the public good and private good determines the nature of the tax regime. In particular, the paper characterizes conditions on preferences under which the Na...

In traditional public good experiments participants receive an endowment from the experimenter that can be invested in a public good or kept in a private account. In this paper we present an experimental environment that uses participants time as their natural endowment, which can be invested in the public good experiment. The experiment runs for several days and participants can make contribut...

PGP’s “web of trust” approach provides basic identification facilities. One benefit of this approach is that it tries to lower the infrastructure requirements such that, for example, no certification authorities are required. In this paper we also pursue this objective but take it even further. We present a self-contained P2P-based directory that provides similar guarantees for identification a...