Because they supplement the municipal provision of local public goods, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) provide an opportunity to examine the space, scope, and determinants of the provision of local public goods. A BID is formed when a group of merchants or commercial property owners in a neighborhood vote in favor of package of self-assessments and local public goods to be funded with tho...

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free-riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a se...

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a se...

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a se...

Insensitivity to quantity in valuation appears in 3 ways: embedding (when willingness to pay for a good is smaller if assessed after a superordinate good), insensitivity to numerical quantity, and adding up (when willingness to pay for 2 goods is less than inferred from willingness to pay for each good alone). Results of 11 experiments on these effects are generally inconsistent with 3 accounts...

the public sector is an influential partner of the market economy in many developing countries. in the absence of government’s intervention, economic functioning of these countries could turn into constant disequilibrium without any hope of growth and economic prosperity. on the other hand unlimited government intervention could harm the economic growth by unnatural expansion of public sector a...

Is the cost of living higher for the poor? Recent studies based on unit values (the ratio of expenditure to quantity) suggest that poor households pay substantially higher prices because liquidity constraints force them to purchase goods in small quantities and not realize bulk discounts. Unit values are subject to several biases and reflect economizing choices made by households, so they may n...