Search results for "Public Good"
showing 10 items of 70 documents
Peer Discipline and Incentives Within Groups
2014
We investigate how a collusive group can sustain non-Nash actions by enforcing internal discipline through costly peer punishment. We give a simple and tractable characterization of schemes that minimize discipline costs while preserving incentive compatibility. We apply the model to a public goods contribution problem. We find that if the per-capita benefit from the public good is low, then regardless of whether peer discipline is feasible or not only small groups will contribute to the good. If the public good benefit is significant but peer discipline is infeasible it remains the case that only small groups contribute. On the other hand, if the public good benefit is significant but peer…
Pool punishment in public goods games: How do sanctioners’ incentives affect us?
2021
Abstract Centralized sanctioning in social dilemmas has been shown to increase efficiency with respect to standard decentralized peer punishment. In this context, we explore the impact of sanctioners’ motivations through their payoff scheme, not only on their actions but also on the actions of the monitored individuals. To do so, we compare the implementation of two different payoff schemes for the monitor in a centralized sanctioning framework: (i) a fixed payoff scheme and (ii) a variable payoff scheme contingent on the level of cooperation achieved. We find that providing the sanctioner with a contingent payoff has a negative impact on contributions. This occurs although sanctioners impl…
Market for ideas and reception of physiocracy in Spain: some analytical and historical suggestions
1995
This essay aims to situate the phenomenon of the international spread of the economic ideas of a particular school of thought within the framework of the ‘market for ideas' approach outlined by George Stigler. On the one hand, the paper attempts to amplify the theoretical model of a demand-driven market for ideas, introducing the concepts of public goods, utility, transaction costs and other institutional variables, and on the other this analytical approach is applied to the Spanish market for ideas of the 18th century and its reception of physiocracy, obtaining a new perspective on the spread of ideas of the iconomistes in comparison with the existing literature.
Complejidad social y calidad informativa: hacia un periodismo "glocal"
2013
In the so-called information (and knowledge) society, quality information is, more than ever, an indispensable and inalienable public good for any citizen who wants to exercise his or her civic and political rights. Because of this, we need to have reliable (rigorous and autonomous) communication media, which disseminate relevant and quality information. But journalism does not only depend on structural questions, but also on the conditions and limits (such as simplification, for instance) that mark professional praxis, either of the political or the socioeconomic type. Social complexity requires a treatment of information that might explain reality, which implies taking advantage of the sc…
Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations: The Efficiency Effect of Taxes, Transfers, and Fiscal Illusion
2012
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency cost of transfers. To this end, we develop a model of individual demand decisions about the provision of a regional public good that encompasses a continuum of tax–transfer scenarios to finance regional public expenditure. We assume that individuals have identical quasi-linear preferences defined over private consumption and the regional public good, that endowment income varies between individuals and regions, and that regions have different predetermined sizes. In an economy-wide resource constrained framework we show that, despite its simplicity, this model is capable of discriminating the efficiency properties of the different scen…
Constitutional rules and competitive politics: their effects on secessionism
2002
Albert Breton and Pierre Salmon argue that the effects of constitutiona l rules depend on the nature of political competition and on some meta-rules that contain procedures regulating the application and the modification of constitutiona l rules. They outline two models of competition - electoral competition and compound government competition - and describe the nature of the transactions between the parties involved in the two corresponding settings. In both, the transactions are over constitutional rules and ordinary goods and services, all of which are arguments in the utility functions of citizens. To make the discussion more concrete, the paper focuses on the demand for political auton…
Complementarity between human capital and public infrastructure in industrial comparative advantage
2021
The article examines the role of public capital as an infrastructure service in the acquisition of industrial comparative advantages. To achieve this in this framework, we develop a theoretical model highlighting the complementarity between public and human capital as a mechanism of industrial development, and test this idea using sectoral panel data from 1999 to 2014 across 35 advanced and less advanced countries. Our results show that the sustainable acquisition of a comparative advantage in the production of industrial goods can only be guaranteed by accumulating public capital and human capital. It shows that public infrastructure can only generate industrialization when it is made avai…
Shame in decision making under risk conditions: Understanding the effect of transparency.
2017
The role played by the emotion of shame in the area of decision-making in situations of risk has hardly been studied. In this article, we show how the socio-moral emotions and the anticipated feeling of shame associated with different options can determine our decisions, even overriding the cognitive choice tendency proposed by the certainty effect. To do so, we carried out an experiment with university students as participants, dividing them into four experimental conditions. Our findings suggest that people avoid making unethical decisions, both when these decisions are made public to others and when they remain in the private sphere. This result seems to indicate that the main factor in …
Do Children Cooperate Conditionally? Adapting the Strategy Method for First-Graders
2018
We develop a public goods game (PGG) to measure cooperation and conditional cooperation in young children. Our design addresses several obstacles in adapting simultaneous and sequential PGGs to children who are not yet able to read or write, do not possess advanced abilities to calculate payoffs, and only have a very limited attention span at their disposal. It features the combination of haptic offline explanation, fully standardized audiovisual instructions, computerized choices based on touch-screens, and a suitable incentive scheme. Applying our experimental protocol to a sample of German first-graders, we find that already 6-year-olds cooperate conditionally and that the relative frequ…
Different meanings of ´knowledge as commodity` in the context of higher education
2013
Commodification has been and still is one of the key processes within capitalist market economies. Since the 1970s, different forms of knowledge have increasingly been subjected to this process. In this paper the commodification of knowledge in the field of higher education is defined in a broad sense as an example of the intensive enlargement of capitalism. I argue that knowledge shares some features of public goods and can be subjected to commodification both as an educational product and academic research itself. However, the simple dichotomy of public vs. private good is not nuanced enough to understand the status of knowledge within higher education. How to reconstruct this dichotomy,…