Many public goods like dams, fire departments, and lighthouses do not provide direct utility but act more as insurance devices against floods, fire, and shipwreck. They either diminish the probability or the size of the loss. We extend the public good model with this insurance aspect and generalize Samuelson’s efficient allocation rule when self-insurance and self-protection expenditures are pu...

Most pure public goods like lighthouses, dams, or national defense provide utility mainly by insuring against hazardous events. Our paper focuses on this insurance character of public goods. As for private actions against hazardous events, one can distinguish between self-insurance (SI) and self-protection (SP) also in the context of public goods. For both cases of SI and SP we analyze efficien...

In the recent literature, several hypotheses have been offered to explain patterns of human behavior in social environments. In particular, these patterns include 'prosocial' ones, such as fairness, cooperation, and collective good provision. Psychologists suggest that these prosocial behaviors are driven not by miscalculations, but by salience of social identity, in-group favoritism, emotion, ...

Microbial populations often rely on the cooperative production of extracellular " public goods " molecules. The cooperative nature of public good production may lead to minimum viable population sizes, below which populations collapse. In addition, " cooperator " public goods producing cells face evolutionary competition from non-producing mutants, or " freeloaders ". Thus, public goods coopera...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to estimate utility losses cause...