Search results for "Public Good"
showing 10 items of 70 documents
Costly punishment prevails in intergroup conflict.
2011
Understanding how societies resolve conflicts between individual and common interests remains one of the most fundamental issues across disciplines. The observation that humans readily incur costs to sanction uncooperative individuals without tangible individual benefits has attracted considerable attention as a proximate cause as to why cooperative behaviours might evolve. However, the proliferation of individually costly punishment has been difficult to explain. Several studies over the last decade employing experimental designs with isolated groups have found clear evidence that the costs of punishment often nullify the benefits of increased cooperation, rendering the strong human tenden…
Green and Greenback
2003
The low-cost hypothesis predicts that the strength of effects of environmental concern on environmental behavior diminishes with increasing behavioral costs. Thus, environmental concern influences environmental behavior primarily in situations and under conditions connected with low costs and little inconvenience for individual actors. In a first step, we develop and specify this hypothesis. Referring to two procedures, we then test it on the basis of an environmental survey of a random sample of 2307 respondents from the German population. The empirical evidence is positive. The low-cost hypothesis is not confined to the area of environmental research. It points to general limits of attit…
To Pay or Not to Pay: Competing Theories to Explain Individuals’ Willingness to Pay for Public Environmental Goods
2010
Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively. Several theories have been proposed in an attempt to explain individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for public environmental goods. While most studies only take into account a single theory, this article discusses competing theories. These include, in addition to a basic economic model, the theory of public goods, Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior, and Schwartz’s norm-activation…
Where are we now with global forest regulation and governance? Insights from a 'Global Public Goods' Perspective
2016
Even if an encouraging tendency has recently been observed towards a reduction in the rates of global deforestation, the extent and quality of forests continue to decline in many regions of the world, with alarming consequences on the functioning of global hydrological cycles, the conservation of the world's biological diversity, and the fight against climate change. Against this background, the aim of the present article is to investigate the weaknesses of, and the areas for improvement in, the current framework of global forest governance, through an analysis conducted using the lens of the concept of «global public goods» as transposed into, and shaped by, two competing theoretical appro…
Food traditions and consumer preferences for cured meats: Role of information in geographical indications
2021
Abstract Growth and development are two economic concepts that should go hand in hand. In a specific territory, the search for sustainable development is intertwined with the objectives of private operators but also with the public ones of collective well-being. As we know from the economic literature, the presence of information asymmetries leads to market failure as sustainability in the production of food products determines positive externalities that are not adequately remunerated. In this work some evolutionary trends in the demand for cured meats are analyzed, highlighting the relevant innovations introduced by sustainable consumption. Faced with this evolution of demand, with consum…
Tax compliance and wealth inequality
2019
In this work, we theoretically approach optimal taxing in a public good provision context in a society where wealth is Pareto distributed. Our main result shows that high levels of wealth inequalit...
Environmental damage evaluation in a willingness-to-accept scenario: A latent-class approach based on familiarity
2015
In this paper we report on the results of the application of a latent class model that was designed to identify and characterize unobserved preference heterogeneity in the context of a willingness-to-accept (WTA) framework involving negative environmental externalities stemming from the expansion of the Port of Valencia. We investigated the hypothesis that respondents with greater familiarity with the targeted good and any related environmental damage would demand more compensation; that is, they would have a significantly higher WTA. Based on respondents' familiarity with the Port of Valencia and their pre-existing knowledge about the negative consequences of its potential expansion three …
Size, fungibility, and the strength of lobbying organizations
2017
Available online: 12 January 2017 How can a small special interest group successfully get an inefficient transfer at the expense of a much larger group with many more resources available for lobbying? We consider a simple model of agenda setting where two groups of different size lobby a politician over a transfer from one group to the other, and the group which sets the agenda can choose the size of the proposed transfer. The groups have resources which are used to pay the politician and to overcome the public goods problem within the group. Our key result is that which group prevails in the agenda setting game depends crucially on whether the transfers can also be used to pay the politici…
Remote sensing:A case for moving space data towards the public good
2008
This paper discusses whether current international and national regulation of remote sensing activities achieves a true balance between proprietary interests of producers of remote sensing data and information and the needs of the community in accessing that data and information. By subjecting remote sensing data to general copyright restrictions that are often coupled with exclusive licences, irrespective of type or use of data and/or information, the development of important secondary information markets could be negatively hampered. In the long run, over-regulating access to space data may prove counter-productive in the information age. Using examples of different modes of information d…
Do university technology transfers increase firms’ innovation?
2020
Abstract We investigate how technology transfers from universities to private firms influence firm innovativeness. Using data on R&D acquisitions from universities of more than 10,000 Spanish firms for the period 2005–2013 and applying propensity score matching techniques, we find that technology transfers from universities strongly increase firm innovativeness. We next explore heterogeneous effects in order to analyze whether these gains are mediated by firm size and the business cycle. Our results suggest that the contribution of universities to firm innovation is particularly important for small firms and during the whole business cycle. The contribution of universities goes beyond its d…