A robust finding in economics is that decision-makers often exhibit a much smaller dollar willingness to pay (WTP) for an item than the minimum amount that they claim to be willing to accept (WTA) to part with it. The spread between these two numbers is particularly large for public goods, raising serious public policy concerns regarding which number, if either, is appropriate for valuing such ...

Prosocial incentives are recognized as effective tools to promote public cooperation. But their usage is costly, hence we need find an optimal policy that offers the best outcome for a minimal cost. This problem has attracted extensive attention of scholars from many fields, and it been studied intensively in well-mixed populations. Yet, system behavior case group interactions where decentraliz...

Court decisions in the past twenty years such as Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mount Laurel Associated, as well recent legislation, have made exclusionary zoning laws based on race illegal and have limited, at least in many states, the legality of exclusionary zoning based on income. While there may be a number of reasons for the use of exclusionary or fiscal zoning, an economic rationale...

The literature on the role of firm level innovation process mostly deals with the production of private goods as opposed to public goods. The innovation paradigms that are currently being encountered endow us with an opportunity to design a framework leading to a model of enabling firms to produce public goods. Public goods face two kinds of problems: one arising due to lack of either administr...