The penetration speed of global Internet access has been extraordinary in the past decade. This phenomenon results in a near zero-time distribution of digital goods from companies to their customers. It also further reduces the already low “production” costs, where digital goods such as computer software and music songs are stored in CD/DVD, cassette tapes, floppy disks or other similar media, ...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue. Moreover, technological change has eliminated the importance of fixed infrastructure transport (rail and wat...

Recent work on public goods contributions has examined the relationship between gender and free-riding behavior in studies using laboratory public goods. This research furthers this line of inquiry by examining gender as a possible explanation of hypothetical bias, which occurs in valuation studies using real world public goods. Results show that gender differences exist in hypothetical valuati...

We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods to multiple agents. Recent work [Bouveret and Lang, 2011] focused on allocating goods in a sequential way, and studied what is the “best” sequence of agents to pick objects based on utilitarian or egalitarian criterion. In this paper, we propose a parallel elicitation-free protocol for allocating indivisible goods. In every round of ...

The free riding hypothesis has been the subject of laboratory experiments for more than a decade. While the extent of free riding has often varied across experiments, three observations are consistently replicated. First, there is no significant evidence of free riding in single-shot games. Marwell and Ames (1981) for instance, found that subjects generally provide the public good at levels hal...

The Web has many sites where users can exchange goods and services. Often, the end-users must write free-text descriptions of the goods and services they have available, or the goods and services they are seeking. The quality of these descriptions is often low. In this paper, we describe the GhostWriter system, which encourages users to write descriptions that are more comprehensive. The system...

We examine why heterogenous communities may fail to provide public goods. Current work characterizes sanctioning free-riders as an under-supplied public good. We argue that often free-riders can be punished by the coordinated action of a group. This punishment can be profitable, and need not be undersupplied. But the power to expropriate defectors can also be used to expropriate outgroups. Hete...

Open source software, developed by volunteers, appears counter to the conventional wisdom that without ownership rights or government intervention, public goods will not be efficiently provided. But complexity makes a difference: contracts are incomplete and ownership rights do not necessarily elicit socially optimal effort. I consider three mechanisms that improve the provision of complex soft...