Voluntary Participation Game Experiments with a Non-Excludable Public Good: Is Spitefulness a Source of Cooperation?.

Economic theory predicts that it is impossible to have cooperation in finitely repeated games such as a prisoner's dilemma game without communication. In an experiment on a voluntary participation game with a non-excludable public good that is a version of a Hawk-Dove game, we obderved that evolutionary stable strategies did not appear, but cooperation emerged through a transmutation from the Hawk-Dove game to a game where a dominant strategy outcome is Pareto efficient.GAME THEORY ; EXPERIMENTS

Non-Excludable Public Good Experiments revised October 2003, forthcoming in Games and Economic Behavior.

We conduct a two-stage game experiment with a non-excludable public good. In the first stage, two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good. In the second stage, knowing the other subject's commitment decision, subjects who did not to commit in the first stage choose contributions to the public good. We found no upport for the evolutionary stable strategy equilibrium, and the ratio of subjects who did not commit to contributing nothing increased as periods advanced; that is, the free-riding rate declined over time.Furthermore, this behavior did not arise due to altruism or kindness among subjects, but from spiteful behavior of subjects.

Secure Implementation: Strategy-Proof Mechanisms Reconsidered

Strategy-proofness, requiring that truth-telling is a dominant strategy, is a standard concept in social choice theory. However, the concept of strategy-proofness has serious drawbacks. First, announcing one's true preference may not be a unique dominant strategy, and using the wrong dominant strategy may lead to the wrong outcome. second, almost all strategy-proof mechanisms have a continuum of Nash equilibria, most of which produce the wrong outcome. Third, experimental evidence shows that most of the strategy-proof mechanisms do not work well. We argue that a possible solution to this dilemma is to require double implementation in Nash equilibrium and in dominant strategies, which we call secure implementation. We characterize environments where secure implementation is possible, and compare it with dominant strategy implementation. An interesting example of secure implementation is a Groves mechanism when preferences are single-peaked.

Globalisation and National Incentives for Protecting Environmental Goods

This article tries to explain national incentives for protecting environmental goods either autonomously or collectively; it explores how globalisation has affected those incentives; and it suggests how national environmental policy might respond so as to ensure its effectiveness. The central argument is that national incentives for environmental protection may to a considerable extent be explained by a combination of the type of environmental good to be protected (in terms of public goods theory) and the effects of environmental protection measures on international competitiveness. Arrangements for protecting environmental goods can be ranked according to their centripetal effects on non-participating countries. Centripetal effects are strongest in the case of club goods (1), followed by private goods (2), public goods (3), and common pool resources (4). The centripetal effects resulting from the type of environmental good can be further reinforced by competitive advantages resulting from environmental protection measures; they can be weakened by competitive disadvantages; or they can remain unchanged due to competitive neutrality. The combination of four types of environmental goods and three types of competitive effects (positive, negative, neutral) results in twelve possible cases, with differing national incentives for autonomous and collective environmental protection. Given specific assumptions, these twelve cases can be ranked with regard to the severity of collective action problems they involve. The article includes a short empirical illustration for each case. It also analyses how globalisation (in the form of increasing trade) and some of its driving forces (in the form of free trade agreements) influence national incentives and legal possibilities for environmental protection. This article concludes with a brief discussion of four options for (re-)expanding the action space for national environmental policies under the condition of economic globalisation.

Understanding the Challenges of the Digital Economy: The Nature of Digital Goods

This article investigates the economic nature and characteristics of digital goods. Such goods are, due to their replicability, shown to be public goods (albeit in an evolutionary way) and durable goods. Furthermore, the content of such goods, combined with their durability, makes them experience goods. While only one of these characteristics would be sufficient to create difficulties for producers and lead to market failure, this article demonstrates that each of the characteristics reinforces the other. The framework presented in the article is then applied to two important issues: the new trend of massive consumer piracy and the overall problem of value of digital goodsdigital goods, public goods, durable goods, experience goods, piracy.

Private Provision of a Complementary Public Good

For several years, an increasing number of firms have been investing in Open Source Software (OSS). While improvements in such a non-excludable public good cannot be appropriated, companies can benefit indirectly in a complementary proprietary segment. We study this incentive for investment in OSS. In particular we ask how (1) market entry and (2) public investments in the public good affect the firms' production and profits. Surprisingly, we find that there exist cases where incumbents benefit from market entry. Moreover, we show the counter-intuitive result that public spending does not necessarily lead to a decreasing voluntary private contribution.Open Source Software, private provision of public goods, Cournot-Nash equilibrium, complements, market entry