Sharing health risk and income risk within households: evidence from Japanese data

The question of which household members should consume medical services, and in what quantities, is examined by using Japanese household-level data. Two key concepts are employed, health risk and income risk, and whether family heads or dependants bear these risks investigated. Health risk is the risk that a household member falls ill, while income risk is the risk that future household income decreases. It is found that both heads and dependants make fewer visits to doctors as household size increases. It is also found that only dependants visited doctors less frequently following the reform of the public health insurance system, which raised the co-payment rate of family heads from 10% to 20%. These findings imply that heads and dependants share health risk but dependants bear income risk.     

Conflict technology in cooperation: The group size paradox revisited

This paper studies the implications of punishment‐induced conflict in a public goods game. It shows, under plausible assumptions, how larger group size sometimes enhances punishing behavior in social dilemmas and hence supports higher levels of cooperation. Unlike existing approaches that focus on uncoordinated punishment, I consider punishment as a coordinated activity that may be resisted by those being punished and study the implications of punishment‐induced conflict situations. Developing a conflict model of punishment and combining it with a standard public good game, I show that coordinated punishment can yield the concentration effect of punishment, leading to a larger group advantage; that is, the larger the group, the easier it becomes to organize cooperation. The key idea is that when punishers coordinate their punishment, punishers as a coalition successfully divide defectors and punish each defector one by one. Surprisingly, even when coordination among punishers decays as group size increases, as long as the rate of decaying remains relatively slow the larger group advantage still obtains.     

Rent Seeking for Pure Public Goods: Wealth and Group's Size Heterogeneity

We study how between‐group wealth and size asymmetries affect aggregate rent‐seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous analyses on between‐group asymmetries, we measure the utility cost of rent‐seeking in terms of the loss in private consumption an individual faces when contributing to this activity. Our main result is that fewer between‐group asymmetries do not necessarily imply greater aggregate rent‐seeking efforts. The result is at odds with the commonly held notion that the more homogeneous the contestants in a static rent‐seeking model, the greater the aggregate rent‐seeking efforts.     

Discrimination via Exclusion: An Experiment on Group Identity and Club Goods

We study using laboratory experiments the impact on cooperation of allowing individuals to invest in group‐specific, excludable public goods. We find that allowing different social groups to voluntarily contribute to such goods increases total contributions. However, a significant proportion of that contribution goes toward the group‐specific club good rather than the public good, even when the latter has higher financial returns to cooperation. We find significant evidence of in‐group biases, which are manifested by positive in‐group reciprocity. That is, club goods allow subjects to display their preferences for interaction with their in‐group members, as well as positive in‐group reciprocity.     

Non-monotonic group-size effect in repeated provision of public goods

This paper analyzes the effect of a change in group size on incentives to contribute in repeated provision of pure public goods. We develop a model in which group members interact repeatedly, and might be temporarily unable to contribute to public goods production during some periods. We show that an increase in the group size generates two opposite effects – the standard free-riding effect that suppresses cooperation, and the novel large-scale effect that enhances cooperation. Our results indicate that the former effect dominates in relatively large groups while the latter dominates in relatively small groups. We, therefore, provide a rationale for a non-monotonic group-size effect that may explain previous empirical and experimental findings.     

Intragroup competition in public good games: The role of relative performance incentives and risk attitudes

We analyze a public good game (PGG) with intragroup competition in which, generally but not always, the dominant strategy is to not contribute; therefore, free riding is the unique Nash equilibrium, not achieving Pareto efficiency. We propose a PGG setup where subjects' contributions are rewarded with different individual returns following a rank‐order voluntary contribution mechanism. It is found that the resulting competition for a better return significantly increases contributions. This effect is sensitive to the salience of return differences rewarding higher contributions. Furthermore, the positive effect of return differences on contribution levels depends on an individual's return‐to‐risk sensitivity as elicited through an independent risk elicitation task.     

Collective Risk Control and Group Security: The Unexpected Consequences of Differential Risk Aversion

We provide an analysis of odds‐improving self‐protection for when it yields collective benefits to groups, such as alliances of nations, for whom risks of loss are public bads and prevention of loss is a public good. Our analysis of common risk reduction shows how diminishing returns in risk improvement can be folded into income effects. These income effects then imply that whether protection is inferior or normal depends on the risk aversion characteristics of underlying utility functions, and on the interaction between these, the level of risk, and marginal effectiveness of risk abatement. We demonstrate how public good inferiority is highly likely when the good is “group risk reduction.” In fact, we discover a natural or endogenous limit on the size of a group and of the amount of risk controlling outlay it will provide under Nash behavior. We call this limit an “Inferior Goods Barrier” to voluntary risk reduction. For the paradigm case of declining risk aversion, increases in group size(wealth) will cause provision of more safety to change from a normal to an inferior good thereby creating such a barrier.     

POLITICAL INEQUALITY,CENTRALIZED SANCTIONING INSTITUTIONS,AND THE MAINTENANCE OF PUBLIC GOODS

Centralized sanctioning institutions cultivate cooperation by eradicating the gains from free‐riding. Studies show that electing a community member to operate a centralized sanctioning institution further increases support for the public good. These studies have overlooked an all‐too‐common attribute of non‐laboratory elections: political inequality. In this paper, we replicate those studies and, then, introduce novel experimental treatments that examine how political inequality influences the cooperation‐enhancing effect of a democratic election to centralized sanctioning institutions. In our novel treatment conditions, participants receive either a random allotment of votes that they can use to elect a centralized sanctioning authority or an allocation of votes proportional to their earnings in a previously‐executed public goods game. We find that political inequalities created via the random allocation of votes do not hinder cooperation, whereas political inequalities created via past game play undermine elected authorities and diminish contributions to the public good from individuals advantaged by political inequality.     

Half a Century of Public Software Institutions: Open Source as a Solution to Hold‐Up Problem

We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the underinvestment due to fear of hold‐up. An inefficient hold‐up occurs when a user of software must make complementary investments, when the return on such investments depends on future cooperation of the software vendor, and when contracting about a future relationship with the software vendor is not feasible. We also consider how the nature of the production function of software makes software cheaper to develop when the code is open to the end users. Our framework explains why open source dominates certain sectors of the software industry (e.g., programming languages), while being almost non existent in some other sectors (e.g., computer games). We then use our discussion of efficiency to examine the history of institutions for provision of public software from the early collaborative projects of the 1950s to the modern “open source” software institutions. We look at how such institutions have created a sustainable coalition for provision of software as a public good by organizing diverse individual incentives, both altruistic and profit‐seeking, providing open source products of tremendous commercial importance, which have come to dominate certain segments of the software industry.     

Providing global public goods under uncertainty

We study how uncertainty and risk aversion affect international agreements to supply global public goods. We consider a benchmark model with homogeneous countries and linear payoffs. When countries directly contribute to a public good, uncertainty tends to lower signatories' efforts but may increase participation. Despite risk aversion, uncertainty may improve welfare. In contrast, when countries try to reduce a global public bad, uncertainty tends to increase signatories' efforts and decrease participation. In that case, an ex-ante reduction of uncertainty may have a large positive multiplier effect on welfare.     

The Effect of Communication Media on Cooperation

Abstract. We examine how communication affects cooperation with the help of seven standard public goods experiments that only differ with respect to the medium of pre‐play communication. Our treatments include bidirectional and unidirectional communication via (mostly electronic) auditory and/or visual channels. The results suggest that successful cooperation is attributable to the opportunity of ‘coordinating’ behavior in the communication phase. Furthermore, both the level and the stability of cooperation significantly interact with the communication medium, even though the content of communication is remarkably similar across the communication treatments.     

Uncertainty and the Voluntary Provision of a Pure Public Good in a Two‐Moment Decision Model

In this paper, we explore the potential benefits of uncertainty that may arise in a two‐moment model of the voluntary provision of a pure public good. We find that an increase in a given contributor i’s risk associated with the aggregate contribution level of the other contributors (i.e., an increase in social uncertainty) induces that contributor to increase his own contribution level if and only if the uncertainty's incremental effect on the expected value of his net marginal utility is negative. Contributor i’s welfare likewise increases when a closely related condition is met, namely that the uncertainty's marginal effect on his expected marginal utility value of the public good exceeds its countervailing effect on the numeraire. Further, the corresponding aggregate contribution to the public good increases in the presence of free‐riding if and only if the incremental effect of contributor i’s contribution on the aggregate expected value of all other contributors’ net marginal utilities is small‐enough positive. We derive similar conditions for the case of private uncertainty, where the increase in contributor i’s risk is associated with his own marginal valuation of the public good. A simple example illustrates these conceptual results. Numerical analysis demonstrates that an increase in private uncertainty can have a nonmonotonic impact on contributor i’s welfare.     

ON THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC DEBT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH: DOES COUNTRY RISK MATTER?

This study examines the nonlinear impacts of four country risk indices on the debt‐growth nexus for 61 countries in a panel data framework. Our results show evidence of the different debt‐growth nexus under the different degrees of country risk. Under a high‐risk environment, a country's economic growth is harmed by raising its public debt. The negative effects public debt has on economic growth become weak under low political and financial‐risk environments, while an increase in public debt could help to stimulate economic growth under low composite and economic risk environments. In addition, the differences of countries' income and debt levels also lead country risks to have different effects on the debt‐growth nexus, suggesting that a country should borrow appropriately based on its current risk environments while improving economic performance. (JEL C33, E02, H63, O43)     

Global Security Policies against Terrorism and the Free Riding Problem: An Experimental Approach

The World Trade Center attack has shed light on the urgent need to implement preventing measures against terrorism and to enhance cooperation in the global security system for all countries. However, international coordination cannot be taken for granted. It is often ineffective and likely to fail for several reasons. Perhaps the more prominent reason to explain failure in coordination is that collective actions against terrorism may suffer from the well‐known free riding problem. In this paper we experimentally investigate cooperation dilemma in counterterrorism policies by measuring to what extent international deterrence policy may suffer from free riding. In our game, contributions to the group account do not aim to increase the production of the public good but instead seek to decrease the probability that a stochastic event destroys the good. A country could choose to free ride by investing nothing in the international deterrence policy and instead invest all its resources in its own national protection or even choose to ignore totally terrorism by investing on alternative projects. We also look at the effects of institutions that allow sanctioning and rewarding of other countries to facilitate coordination on deterrence policy. We find that, in absence of institutional incentives and after controlling for risk aversion, most of countries defect by investing very weakly in collective actions against terrorism while largely investing to protect themselves. In contrast, the introduction of punishment/reward incentive systems improves significantly the contribution level to the collective security account.     

Designing the optimal public pension system

This paper uses a two‐period overlapping generations model in order to provide a theoretical design for the optimal public pension system based on a partial equilibrium analysis. Household preferences depend on two periods' consumption and leisure and are positively homogeneous of degree m with respect to consumption in the working and retired periods. We present characteristic features of the optimal public pension system in this paper. First, differences in the population growth rate do not affect the large/small relation between the optimal net lifetime burden rates of generations. Second, we present the optimal public pension system explicitly if m < 1 and m ≠ 0. Third, the difference between the market time‐preference rate and the social time‐preference rate provides a crucial insight into the optimal burden rate of each generation.     

A Public Choice Approach to Strategic and Nonstrategic Environmental Policy

In this paper we take a public choice perspective on strategic environmental policy and international environmental agreements. We examine cooperative and noncooperative environmental policies under governments that are either welfare maximizers (“good dictators”) or tax revenue maximizers (“Leviathans”). We show that Leviathans can perform better in terms of welfare and that good dictators can set higher taxes. We then analyze international environmental agreements and show that the breakdown of environmental cooperation can indeed lead to a welfare gain for all signatory countries. Considering a delegation game between governments, we find that a Pareto‐superior Leviathan outcome can be the unique Nash equilibrium.     

Framing and Misperception in Public Good Experiments

Earlier studies have found that framing has a substantial impact on the degree of cooperation observed in public good experiments. We show that the way the public good game is framed affects misperceptions about the incentives of the game. Moreover, we show that such framing‐induced differences in misperceptions are linked to the framing effect on subjects' cooperation behavior. When we do not control for the different levels of misperceptions between frames, we observe a significant framing effect on subjects' cooperation preferences. However, this framing effect becomes insignificant once we remove subjects who misperceive.     

The capital asset pricing model in economic perspective

The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is theoretically incomplete in its demand-side focus, risk-averse investors and internally inconsistent homogeneous beliefs; is not conclusively supported empirically; and yet it legitimizes a notion that investors can earn higher returns by bearing undiversifiable risk. Our article does not merely extend the CAPM with more realistic assumptions, it completes its original framework by including (1) risk-taking investors in the investor population, (2) investors who can have heterogeneous expectations or beliefs – an overlooked but required condition for the CAPM to be an internally consistent and meaningful model of competitive financial asset pricing under uncertainty and (3) a positive-sloped short-run supply curve based on a reasonable interpretation of the nature of financial asset trade. Upon a complete economic interpretation, it is shown that the equilibrium (systematic) risk-rate of return relationship depends on whose aggregate trading activity dominates, risk-averse or risk-taking investors’. There is no universal, or even general, positive relationship between systematic risk and rate of return. This has far-reaching implications for investors and investment advisors who serve them.     

Private investment with social benefits under uncertainty: The dark side of public financing

We develop a game‐theoretic model of private–public contribution to a long‐term project with sequential actions and moral hazard. A private agent is one who is in charge of both the financial contribution and the management effort, these two actions entailing private costs and uncertain ex‐post private and social benefits. A public agent is one who decides the amount of public funding to this quasi‐public good, knowing that the size and the probability of attaining a surplus ex post depend on the private agent's effort. We consider four public‐funding scenarios: benefit‐sharing versus cost‐sharing crossed with ex‐ante versus ex‐interim government intervention. We test our theoretical predictions by means of an experiment that confirms the main result of the model: Cost‐sharing public intervention is more effective than benefit‐sharing in boosting private financial contribution to the project. Furthermore, when public intervention comes after private contribution ( ex‐interim government intervention), both public‐funding scenarios have a negative impact on the private management effort. In our model, the latter result is explained by the private agent's high degree of risk aversion. These results have policy implications for strategic investments with long‐term social consequences. In deciding the optimal timing and method of the contribution, governments should also consider the indirect effects on agents’ long‐term management efforts.     

Private Information in the BBV Model of Public Goods

To analyze the private provision of a public good in the presence of private information, we explore the connections between two frameworks: the binary public good model with threshold uncertainty and the standard continuous model à la Bergstrom et al. Linearity of best responses in others' contributions is key to matching the two frameworks. We identify all utility functions that display this linearity, and we provide conditions ensuring that the minimal properties that Bergstrom et al. require for utilities are satisfied. Using techniques developed in the threshold uncertainty framework, we show existence and uniqueness of the Bayes‐Nash equilibrium—thus generalizing existing results—and we analyze its comparative statics properties. In particular, under the reasonable assumption that agents' income is stochastic and private information, we complement the full‐information crowding‐out and redistribution results of Bergstrom et al. If the government taxes agents' income proportionally and redistributes (expected) revenues lump sum, equilibrium public good provision can increase or decrease, even if the set of contributors is unchanged. Similarly, we show that crowding‐out can be one‐for‐one, less than one‐for‐one, or more than one‐for‐one. Finally, we extend our results to a multidimensional framework in which agents' unit costs of contributions are also private information.