Abstract: This paper experimentally investigates if and how beliefs, trust, and risk attitudes are associated with cooperative behavior. By applying incentivized elicitation methods to measure these concepts, we find that beliefs about others' cooperation and trust are positively correlated with cooperation in a public goods game. However, even though contributing to a public good resembles a situation of making decisions under strategic uncertainty, elicited risk preferences do not seem to explain cooperation in a systematic way.

This paper  investigates how different levels of entrance fees affect donations for a public good, a natural park.

In this paper, we investigate how different levels of entrance fees affect donations for a public good, a natural park.

To explore this issue, the researchers conducted a stated preference study focusing on visitors’ preferences for donating money to raise funds for a protected area in Costa Rica given different entrance fee levels. The results reveal that there is incomplete crowding-out of donations when establishing an entrance fee.

The People’s Republic of China-Global Environment Facility Partnership to Combat Land Degradation in Dryland Ecosystems promotes an integrated ecosystem management (IEM) approach to restore, sustain and enhance the productive capacity of dryland ecosystems.

Pro-environmental behavior is the willingness to cooperate and contribute to environmental public goods. A good understanding of why individuals undertake pro-environmental actions is important in order to construct policies that are aligned with preferences and actual behavioral patterns, such as concern for social esteem and reputation.

Understanding the motivations behind people’s voluntary contributions to public goods is crucial for the broader issues of economic and social development. By using the experimental design of Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001), we investigate the distribution of contribution types in two developing countries with very high collectivism rating – Colombia and Vietnam – and compare our findings with those previously found in developed countries. We also investigate the effect of introducing disclosure of contribution on the distribution of contribution types and on the contribution itself.

In previous studies on public policy under relative-consumption concerns, leisure comparisons have been ignored. In this paper, we consider a two-type optimal non-linear income tax model, in which people care about both their relative consumption and their relative leisure. Increased consumption positionality typically implies higher marginal income tax rates for both ability types, whereas leisure positionality has an offsetting role.

Using individual travel diary data collected before and after the rail transit coverage expansion in urban Beijing, this paper estimates the impact of rail accessibility improvement on the usage of rail transit, automobiles, buses, walking, and bicycling, measured as percent distance traveled by each mode in an individual trip.

The lack of cooperation and prevalence of free riding in efforts to reduce emissions reflects the public good dilemma synonymous with climate change: whereby individual incentives lead to sub-optimal outcomes. This study examines how cooperative norms can be fostered through democratic processes.