Search results for "public good"
showing 10 items of 70 documents
Unemployment, taxation and public expenditure in OECD economies
2008
Abstract This paper considers the financing of productive public goods and social benefits through different types of taxes in a model with unemployment. We incorporate unemployment, caused by the wage-setting behaviour of a monopolistic union, in a neoclassical growth model which integrates a quite detailed structure of taxes used to finance productive public expenditures and social transfers and parameterizes the inefficiency of government to transform taxes into public goods or transfers. The main conclusion is that the relationship between unemployment and labour taxes critically depends on the degree of government efficiency and the unions' perception on how taxes determine the welfare…
Blind justice: An experimental analysis of random punishment in team production
2010
We study the effect of blind punishment in a team production experiment, in which subjects choose non-observable effort levels. In this setting, a random exclusion mechanism is introduced, linked to the normalized group performance (R, from 0 to 1). Every round, each subject is non-excluded from the collective profit with probability R (and with probability 1 ! R gets no benefit from the group account). Punishment does not depend on the individual behavior, but the probability of being punished reflects collective performance. As the exclusion probability is computed at the group level, no individual information is needed to implement exclusion. However, the probabilistic punishment risks t…
Bioenergy chain building: a collective action perspective
2014
Depletion of natural resources has become a key issue on the European policy agenda. Bottom-up measures have emerged in several countries with a view to promoting awareness campaigns and environmental sustainability, with the agenda set by individuals who start up collective initiatives at the local level. Such collective action provides an incentive to free-ride on the contribution of others. Social norms and the consequent behavior of individuals involved in collective action assume a key role in ensuring sustainable use of a public good, achieving significant, long-lasting success. The present study aims to ascertain which determinants most affect farmers’ willingness to contribute to co…
Regulation of Investments in Infrastructure: The Interplay between Strategic Behaviors and Initial Endowments
2012
This paper explores the dynamic properties of price-based policies in a model of competition between two jurisdictions. Jurisdictions invest over time in infrastructure to increase the quality of the environment, a global public good. They are identical in all respects but one: initial stocks of infrastructure. This is a dynamic type of heterogeneity that disappears in the long run. Therefore, at the steady state, usual intuitions from static settings apply: identical jurisdictions inefficiently underinvest, calling for public subsidies. In the short run, however, counterintuitive properties are established: (i) the evolution of capital stocks can be nonmonotonic and (ii) one jurisdiction c…
Inducing efficient conditional cooperation patterns in public goods games, an experimental investigation
2010
This study analyses the behavior in a repeated public goods game when subjects know about the possibility of existence of strict conditional cooperators. We employed a baseline treatment and a threat treatment in which subjects are informed about the possibility of being in a group together with automata playing a grim trigger strategy. We conjecture the resulting game allows for almost fully efficient outcomes. Contributions in the threat treatment increase by 40% before a surprise restart, and by 50% after the surprise restart. In line with the grim trigger strategy subjects contribute either all or nothing in the threat treatment.
On the social value of publicly disclosed information and environmental regulation
2018
Abstract This paper presents an analysis of environmental policy in imperfectly competitive market with publicly disclosed and privately-held information about costs. We examine the potential asymmetry-reducing role of disclosure and its impact on setting environmental taxes. From a policy perspective, our findings show that disclosure with verifiable reports, is a valuable public good, provides greater transparency in the market, and is generally efficiency enhancing. Results suggest that access to publicly disclosed information enables the fine-tuning of the tax rules towards specific environmental circumstances and improves the ability of the regulator to levy firm-specific environmental…
Cooperation and Status in Organizations
2010
We report the results of experiments designed to test the effect of social status on contributions to a public good, with and without punishment. The experiments are conducted in four-person groups in a “star” network, where one central player observes and is observed by the others. This imposes a social structure on the game, and gives the central player a leadership role in the group, simply by virtue of being commonly observed. We further manipulate status by allocating the central position to the person who earns the highest, or the lowest, score on a trivia quiz. These high-status and low-status treatments are compared, and we find that the effect of organizational structure—the existe…
Dynamic Models of International Environmental Agreements: A Differential Game Approach
2012
This article provides a survey of dynamic models of international environmental agreements (IEAs). The focus is on environmental problems that are caused by a stock pollutant as are the cases of the acid rain and climate change. For this reason, the survey only reviews the literature that utilizes dynamic state-space games to analyze the formation of international agreements to control pollution. The survey considers both the cooperative approach and the noncooperative approach. In the case of the latter, the survey distinguishes between the models that assume binding agreements and those that assume the contrary. An evaluation of the state of the art is presented in the conclusions along w…
Designing ecolabels in order to mitigate market failures: an application to agrofood products
2007
For the market for ecofriendly characteristics of agrofood producs effectively, ùeans of mitigationg asymmetric information, informational overload and public goods properties are necessary. Ecolabel success requires a design and an implementation capable of mitigating simultaneously these three sources of market failures. Our contribution differs from many to date by (1) introducing and analyzing the informational overload as a source of market falure and (2) considering the ecolabel, not only as tool to re-establish information summetry between the producer and consumer but also as a way to overcome international overload and public goods problems. We analyze how these sources of market f…
Commoning of territorial heritage and tools of participated sustainability for the production and enhancement of agro-environmental public goods
2021
AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to analyze how the commoning heritage processes find application for the production of agro-environmental public goods in contexts of high socio-economic marginality and environmental vulnerability, characterized by abandonment and from the consumption of agricultural land for food use. The purpose is to understand how these processes are able to influence, at local level, the governance processes for the implementation of environmental protection strategies. The survey made it possible to verify how the commoning processes aimed at the production of agro-environmental goods generate territorial resilience, understood as a community competence able to st…