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The chapters of this dissertation explore complementary areas of applied microeconomics, within the fields of experimental and environmental economics. In each case, preferences and institutions interact in ways that enhance or subvert efficiency. The first chapter, "The Girl Scout Cookie Phenomenon," uses a laboratory experiment to study favor trading in a public goods setting. The ability to practice targeted reciprocity increases contributions by 14%, which corresponds directly to increased efficiency. Subjects discriminate by rewarding group members who have been generous and withholding rewards from ungenerous group members. At least some reciprocal behavior is rooted in other-regarding preferences. When someone is outside the "circle of reciprocity," he gives less to the public good than in other settings. We find no evidence of indirect reciprocity. We find two behavioral types in each treatment, differing in baseline giving but not in tendency to reciprocate. The second chapter, "The Effects of Conservation Reserve Program Participation on Later Land Use," studies another public goods issue: conservation. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pays farmers to retire farmland. We use a treatment effect framework to find that ex-CRP land is 21-28% more likely to be farmed than comparable non-CRP land. This implies that the CRP improves low-quality land, making it more attractive to farm. This could demonstrate inefficiency, since farmers gain private benefit from a program meant to provide a public good. On the other hand, farmed ex-CRP land is more likely to adopt conservation practices, although this may not be caused by CRP participation. The third chapter, "Learning from Mistakes," examines financial decisions by adult Rwandans in institutions inside and outside the lab. Over 50% of subjects make irrational choices over risk—choices that likely do not reflect their preferences, and are therefore likely inefficient—and these subjects share tendencies in their take-up of financial instruments. Risk-averse individuals are more likely to belong to a savings group and less likely to take out an informal loan. For those who make mistakes, however, as they become more risk averse, they are less likely to belong to a savings group and more likely to take up informal credit.

This paper explores the relation between the governmental expenditures on the cultural sector and the performance of the economy in the UK. In welfare economies it is the government’s role to shorten the effects of the occurring market failures. It is shown that in the cultural sector, two market failures, the high fix cost and the productivity lag are appearing. In order to ease these effects the government intervening into the market mechanisms by giving grants and subsidies to the stakeholders. In the empirical part a time series analysis is executed between the GDP, the total governmental expenditures and the governmental expenditures on the cultural services on a 60 years interval in the UK. It is shown that the three variables have the same order of integration, they move together over time, furthermore cointegration was detected between them. With Granger causality test it was proven that there is a bidirectional informal connection between the performance of economy and the government’s cultural expenditures.

This dissertation explores whether fiscal policies can be used as a means of redistribution of power and status, and the ways of transferring state&rsquo / s economic power to social groups. In this regard, state budget is recognized as the main tool for the execution of redistributive policies of the governments. In this framework, this study investigates how budget was employed to change power balance of social groups during the period of 1980-2003, in Turkey. In order to measure the changing power balances budget expenditures and revenues are reclassified and the size of the financial resources allocated or transferred to the particular social groups are determined. The analysis of budget data demonstrated that budget in Turkey has a strong influence on redistributive politics. Regarding the policy making point of view, the traditional centralist approach was deteriorated and increasing number of parties and interest groups involved in budget mechanisms. Another finding is supporting the particular economic or social groups within the current time period or across the periods either through the withdrawal of state sector from the area of traditionally publicly provided private goods / transferring budget resources and changing the taxation policies or by borrowing.

While considering disposing the priority of various kinds of communal facilities, the cost that must assess benefit and make the investment first, will not just have waste or the improper situation of resource distribution. Seeing that public goods importance that benefit assess, it is market that appraise law develop successively and extensive application, it is a law of appraisal more feasible and with more potentiality among them to assess the law in condition, so this research does deep discussion to this. Because the traditional demand theory has it to limit to the public goods short of marketing, unable to get consumer's appraisal on the public goods, this research attempts to bring the public goods into personal utility function, via the deriving of mathematics and physics, under the same demand principle, give monetary value to the public goods. Set up the compensation demand function of the public wealth, and can lead and pay wishing to pay prices of public goods from this. Utilize the compensating demand function, the valuation of pushing away regarded in order to wish to pay prices as benefit of public wealth of the income. To the increase or reduction of the quantity of the public goods, generally often use WTP or WTA. A lot of theories or positive research, mostly inclined to use WTP to draw benefit value in the past. Because target, tour of benefit numerous, visit offering, the estimate of benefit of recreation resources have model public characteristic of wealth, so this text attempts to use the public wealth promptly, and wide CVM (contingent valuation method) accepted, apply to Kaohsiung on resource of recreation, rest of resource assess, hope via personal inherent attitude and wishing pairs of behavior is it is it visit benefit, rest of resource to assess to come different of partiality, this is a purpose of this research. It is 23.94 yuan that visitors, willingness to pay ,the average amount of money of the maintenance expense, develop some continuously forever by safeguarding local ecological resources and tour industry in collecting the maintenance expense, up to 53% of the visitors and will to pay, the amount of money is 23.94 yuan to like to pay on average. If can collect the charges with 2007, calculate in accordance with 580,591 persons, it is 13,902,586.8 yuan.

Coordination and cooperation on public projects, as well as trust among society members are important for economic, social and political activities. This dissertation presents essays on the role of gradualism - increasing the stakes of projects slowly over time rather than starting with large-stake projects immediately - in coordination and trust building under various settings. The first two essays are on simultaneous coordination games when there are multiple equilibria in the one-shot game; the third essay is on sequential trust games when the only subgame perfect equilibrium in the one-shot game predicts that no cooperation occurs at all. The first essay, One Step at A Time: Does Gradualism Build Coordination? (joint with Sam Asher, Lorenzo Casaburi, and Plamen Nikolov), uses a multiple-period binarychoice weakest-link coordination experiment and finds that gradualism leads to better coordination in high-stake projects. The findings point to a voluntary mechanism to promote coordination when the capacity to impose sanctions is limited. This second essay, Gradualism, Weakest Link and Information: Theory and Coordination Experiments, extends the first essay and compares the effects of gradualism under various information and payoff structures. It proposes a belief-based learning framework to explore why and when gradualism may help coordination. It compares the role of gradualism in two weakest-link games under two different information structures: a limited information structure when subjects are only informed whether all group members contribute, and a richer information structure when they are informed exactly how many group members contribute. It finds that richer information feedback facilitates later coordination for the big-bang approach when a group is close to success, thus shrinking the advantage of gradualism. Finally, in a third experiment it finds that allowing free riding worsens coordination in all treatments, and gradualism with imperfect monitoring does not perform better. The third essay, Does Gradualism Build Trust? Evidence from A Multi-round Experiment, examines the effect of gradualism in trust building using a multi-round binarychoice trust (investment) experiment. It finds that gradualism leads to higher trustworthiness at the beginning and higher subsequent trust. However, trustworthiness and trust for all treatments sharply decrease in the end; even gradualism cannot avoid this end-of-game effect.

In my dissertation I propose three counterintuitive social mechanisms to alleviate the risk that collective production will fail to maintain participant involvement and respond to demand. My first study, based on a panel dataset of edits and views of articles in the English Wikipedia, shows that, although collective production lacks a price-like mechanism to estimate demand for the goods it produces, consumers’ contributions act as such a signal to expert producers. In the second paper I examine the theory that collective production participation is greatest when social norms of collaboration are obeyed. Using a large panel dataset of production networks and normrelated behavior in Wikipedia, I show that social norm infringement is not completely detrimental to participation because norm enforcement increases the likelihood that the beneficiary producer continues participating. In my third paper, I rely on interviews with experienced Wikipedia producers to examine whether producers’ ties to non-participants in collective production increase the likelihood of turnover, and whether producers’ embeddedness in collective production reduces turnover risk. Surprisingly, I find that producers with networks rich in ties to non-producers and with a task-oriented approach to collective production are those least likely to stop participating.

It is recognised by society that freshwater resources play a major role in economic development and in maintaining life supporting ecosystems services. Transboundary river basins cover about 45% of the earth’s land surface and their governance is therefore of critical importance. Transboundary freshwater resources are considered a common-pool resource. Collective action is therefore needed in order to supply both public and private goods from these resources but is yet in short supply. This thesis intends to analyse a complementary framework to the common Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach with the objective of enhancing investments in collective action to address this dilemma. Results indicate that transboundary water resources management in itself can be identified as a regional public good. The results also indicate that IWRM has been promoted as a standard management concept; often without first having identified and agreed the objectives of the intended multiple uses of water. Outcomes related to IWRM at the transboundary scale are therefore difficult to identify and evidence points towards continued water quality degradation at a global scale and development opportunities not achieved. Two different tools for how to assess the generation of benefits from cooperation are presented in this thesis including an institutional assessment framework adapted to transboundary institutions. Together these steps make up an outcome-driven approach that clarifies the value of water in all management and development stages. Through such an outcome-driven approach, water issues can provide the incentives necessary in order to identify cooperative paths and thus become important factors in negotiations to establish effective regional governance regimes. This would take the broader political, economic and geographical context into consideration thus supporting a process towards more integration of interests between countries.

Mechanism design theory has given economists a set of tools for designing institutions to achieve socially desirable outcomes. Unfortunately, the behavioral assumptions that these theories often rest are somewhat unrealistic. Testing these institutions in a laboratory setting gives us insight into what assumptions or properties of institutions make them behaviorally successful. Moreover these insights allow us to create new theories that offer, in principle, better actual performance. Thus, the interplay between experimental economics and economic theory seems vital in mechanism design to insure successful institutions. It is in this spirit that this dissertation precedes focusing entirely with mechanisms that were designed to achieve the Lindahl allocation in a public goods environment. The first chapter experimentally examines three such mechanisms in a laboratory setting. It finds that the mechanism that gets the closest to the Lindahl allocation is the one that induces a game with very strong stability of equilibrium properties. Unfortunately this mechanism also has some clear disadvantages: first, it is very complicated; second, payoffs to consumers while learning to play equilibrium are very low; and last, the mechanism gets more complicated when more people participate. The second chapter uses the insights from the first experiment to create a new institution which avoids some of the concerns outlined above while maintaining the strong stability of equilibrium property. The third chapter contributes a missing stability result into the literature. The final chapter of the dissertation experimentally compares the new mechanism introduced in chapter 2 with the most successful mechanism from the first experiment. The treatments in this experiment are designed to stress the above observed trouble areas.

This thesis builds a public goods case for government intervention in the academic journal market. Synthesizing information from interviews with the existing quantitative and qualitative literature accomplishes this goal. The cost of doing business in the academic publishing market has steadily risen over time. In response, an “open access” (OA) movement has formed. Members of the movement argue that making academic research freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection is the ideal way to control these costs. Others, however, are satisfied with the status quo. Determining who pays what price to allow free access has become increasingly important. National open access initiatives could be implemented without government aid if universities and academic libraries worked together; however, a collective action problem prevents cooperation. The government has tools that could be used to help these stakeholders transition to an open access status quo.