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Some of the special problems involved in eliciting preferences for public goods (with which many applications of contingent valuation are concerned) are considered. The defining characteristic of a public good is that the same units of the good are consumed by, or give utility to, more than one individual. The different sections of the chapter address: the theory of public goods, incentive compatibility—as a theoretical problem and as a problem for survey research, the link between preference and choice, voluntary contributions to public goods, and voting to elicit preferences.

This chapter examines the rate of return guarantee options in defined contribution (DC) plans. Guarantees in DC plans offer fixed nominal rates of return over a calendar year. Rate of return guarantees have few behavioural effects on workers, since participants do not determine investments in their pension accounts. The guarantee could affect the extent to which workers assume risk in their nonpension investments, since it makes their investments in their DC plan relatively low risk.

One of the most important departures of the internationalized criminal courts and tribunals from typical full international tribunals is the way in which they are funded. While the bulk of the cost of the international panels in Kosovo and East Timor is incorporated in the budget of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET)/United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) respectively, important budgetary items were left to national authorities. These tribunals have also brazenly accepted voluntary contributions, whether in terms of personnel or equipment. The Special Court in Sierra Leone became the first internationalized tribunal to be funded solely by voluntary contributions.

This chapter examines the development of the official policy towards the idea of voluntary contribution within the health service in Great Britain. It discusses the perception of the hospital contributory schemes from the perspective of those responsible for translating general plans for an extension of health care into practical proposals. It investigates at what point the elimination of the contributory schemes from the structure of the National Health Service (NHS) became inevitable. This chapter suggests that the final shape of the NHS was not the outcome of an unproblematic consensus but a product of negotiation between the interested parties.

Numerous studies have investigated the issue of private provision of public goods using a linear public goods game. This game creates conflict between cooperation, which contributes to the public good, and self-interest, which involves free-riding on others' contributions. Using decision-making experiments, this chapter examines voluntary contributions to a public good. It considers two separate mechanisms for sustaining cooperation over time: recommended play and costly punishments. It compares behaviour in these two experimental treatments to a control treatment with no recommendations or punishments. It also analyses behaviour in groups with a fixed composition over time as well as behaviour in groups with members who are randomly re-matched at the end of each round. The chapter shows that contributions in the initial rounds are higher in the treatment with recommendations than in the baseline and punishment treatments. Contributions decrease much faster with recommendation, whereas contributions increase in treatments with punishment over time.

The case of the WHO reveals the largest discrepancy between key formal rules governing budgeting procedures and the reality of budgeting dynamics and administration. The highly regionalized and fragmented structure of the WHO results in a budget process that is much more complex in practice than formal rules suggest. To accommodate strong regional interests and regionally organized principals, while at the same time managing budget constraints, the WHO budget process combines bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal administrative and political coordination. Due to the increasing importance of earmarked voluntary contributions for the financing of the WHO to approximately 80 percent of its budget, including very substantive financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of around a quarter of its budget, new administrative structures and procedures have been introduced. For example, the Financing Dialogue has become a new element of budgeting in international organizations that attempts to regain control over an ever-more segmented budgetary landscape.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore the ways in which persistent societal problems coupled with rapid wealth creation in the Arab region are driving a new generation of private citizens to commit resources for the greater public welfare. The book focuses on the ways that philanthropic giving currently is formalized into institutions. This is important because of the potential impact institutions can have over time. The chapter then discusses the Arab traditions of giving, Arab philanthropy today, the methodology used in this study, research constraints, and emerging themes in the study findings.

This chapter explores the various ways in which Scots demonstrated their loyalty to the British state in the 1790s. It is argued here that loyalism, and not patriotism, is the better term to use when assessing Scottish support for the government and the British state in the 1790s, and a main theme explored in this analysis is the question of what constitutes genuine loyalty, and how this can be measured. The evidence on loyalism is extensive, and it is clear that the Scots demonstrated their loyalty to the state in a number of different ways, such as loyalist resolutions, suggestions for policy initiatives, offers of personal service to the state, and a variety of voluntary financial contributions. A main argument in this chapter is that, in general terms, loyalism in Scotland comes across as very constructive in its outlook – that it was loyalism on the government’s terms.

Using an overlapping-generations model with randomness in both total endowments and the distribution of endowments between generations, this chapter examines whether markets or governments can generate efficient intergenerational risk sharing. The model makes the standard simplifying assumption that each generation lives only two periods and that only two generations are therefore alive at any one time. In this setting, a long-lived asset can facilitate intergenerational risk sharing by inducing young generations to pay old generations for their claims to the asset. Both markets and governments have the potential to promote risk sharing, markets through the trade of financial instruments, governments through social insurance programs. Each has potential on the intergenerational front since there are financial instruments that last for many generations and some social insurance programs, such as social security or subsidized education, transfer resources across generations. This chapter argues that voluntary contributions are unlikely to work in practice and that efficient government intergenerational transfers may be incompatible with a democratic political system since future generations cannot vote to express their interests.