H41 - Public GoodsNávrat zpět

The overall impact of human activities on the Earth's system and its key elements such as biodiversity or climate is so great that the contemporary era is called the Anthropocene, where globalization is overwhelming and the global influence of human action equals natural processes. This brings about many problems of global nature that are difficult to solve as adequate governance of global common goods is not satisfactorily developed. The various historical and contemporary attempts to provide some form of governance at the global level are presented, including the concept of common heritage of mankind or community approaches. An important contribution represents the concept of global public goods that was espoused by many intergovernmental and international organizations, including the UN and the EU. The relationship with the global sustainable development goals and official development assistance is also mentioned.

The issue of tax compliance represents one of the topics where laboratory experiments may provide important insights into human economic decision making. The empirical evidence on the topic is limited as the decision on tax evasion is purely private information of the taxpayer. The experiment presented in the paper focuses on two main topics. At first, we analyze potential influence of two factors - probability of being caught while cheating on taxes and penalty rate imposed on subject who evade. We conclude that behavior of the Czech subjects corresponds to foreign results. At the same time, there is a stronger effect when probability of being caught increases. The effect of increasing penalty rate is rather moderate. Second research question focuses on the terminology used during the experiment. We find that the rate of tax compliance is higher within experimental sessions where subjects face neutral language in the instructions compared to the group with loaded instruction (tax language). This behavior contradicts the results to date and indicates possible country effect which could be linked to specifics of posttransformational society.

The goal of this paper is to develop the theoretical framework of the public goods provision. This theoretic contribution is based on the critical analysis of mainstream economics theories dealing with public goods as market failure (neoclassical economics and neoliberalism) and on the results of own economic experiment examining the "free-riding" behaviour in the voluntary provision of public goods. The "free rider" problem is one of the main reasons for government intervention in the market. However, there is an inefficiency of public decision making on public provision and financing of selected goods because of the estimating goods values (ex-post consumer utility) problem. Moreover, the results of economic experiments do not support the pure "free rider" theory. However, the economic experiment simulates the real public good consumption that is why this paper contains also the survey of consumers' willingness to pay for specific public goods (public library services) in real terms based on the methodology of contingent valuation method.

One of the key assumptions of neoclassical economics is the existence of the rational individual, who always tries to maximize his or her utility. The paper shows possibilities of experimental evaluation of this hypothesis with respect to the various groups of people who undertake the experiment. Our experiments try to (1) Evaluate real outcomes of model situations, and (2) Find differences between various groups of treated people with respect to our main research question - whether economists behave more selfishly than any other group of people. We employed game theory and its fundamental models - Prisoner's dilemma and Ultimate and Dictator Games. In accordance to previous foreign experiments, we conclude that in real situations people behave in a much less self-interested way than predicted by the economic model. In situations favouring free-riding, people voluntarily contributed to public goods. According to the results of our experiments, the hypothesis that economists are more likely to act for their own self interest cannot be rejected. In both experiments economists behaved in a self interested way, but these results were not prevailing.

Almost all of us sometimes voluntarily give up some scarce resources to make someone else better. Not only the amount of resources used for such purposes, but also other wider concerns (implications for private and government sector) have drawn the attention of economists in recent decades. In this paper I develop a theoretical framework underlying such activities, which can be in short termed as "altruistic". To do so, I first explain the notion of "altruism", as can be found in the works of Adam Smith, Gary Becker and Ludwig von Mises. On these grounds, we can say that by voluntary altruistic transactions the utility of both sides of the transaction has been increased. The main differences between the market and non-market sectors are described and the concept of "social entrepreneurship" is developed. The analysis is concluded by application of this theoretical framework to the case of altruism as a "public good".