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In this paper I examine the incentives of regions to unite, to separate and to provide public goods. Separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of public goods. When public good provision is relatively inexpensive, separation occurs since individuals want to assert greater influence, while for intermediate costs of public good provision, separation can be explained by the desires for greater influence as well as for more public goods. Compared with the social optimum, there are excessive incentives for public good provision as well as excessive incentives for separation.

ABSTRACTThe increasing use of incentive pay schemes in recent years has raised concerns about their potential detrimental effect on intrinsic job satisfaction (JS), job security and employee morale. This study explores the impact of pay incentives on the overall JS of workers in the United Kingdom and their satisfaction with various facets of jobs. Using data from eight waves (1998–2005) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and a uniquely designed well‐being dataset (EPICURUS), a significant positive impact on JS is only found for those receiving fixed‐period bonuses. These conclusions are robust to unobserved heterogeneity, and are shown to depend on a number of job‐quality characteristics that have not been controlled for in previous studies.

This dissertation consists of three papers. The first paper "Managing the Workload: an Experiment on Individual Decision Making and Performance" experimentally investigates how decision-making in workload management affects individual performance. I designed a laboratory experiment in order to exogenously manipulate the schedule of work faced by each subject and to identify its impact on final performance. Through the mouse click-tracking technique, I also collected interesting behavioral measures on organizational skills. I found that a non-negligible share of individuals performs better under externally imposed schedules than in the unconstrained case. However, such constraints are detrimental for those good in self-organizing. The second chapter, "On the allocation of effort with multiple tasks and piecewise monotonic hazard function", tests the optimality of a scheduling model, proposed in a different literature, for the decisional problem faced in the experiment. Under specific assumptions, I find that such model identifies what would be the optimal scheduling of the tasks in the Admission Test. The third paper "The Effects of Scholarships and Tuition Fees Discounts on Students' Performances: Which Monetary Incentives work Better?" explores how different levels of monetary incentives affect the achievement of students in tertiary education. I used a Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit the assignment of different monetary incentives, to study the effects of such liquidity provision on performance outcomes, ceteris paribus. The results show that a monetary increase in the scholarships generates no effect on performance since the achievements of the recipients are all centered near the requirements for non-returning the benefit. Secondly, students, who are actually paying some share of the total cost of college attendance, surprisingly, perform better than those whose cost is completely subsidized. A lower benefit, relatively to a higher aid, it motivates students to finish early and not to suffer the extra cost of a delayed graduation.

THE GROWTH OF CAMPAIGN SPENDING OVER THE PAST DECADE HAS ATTRACTED CONSIDERABLE ATTENTION. RECENT STUDIES HAVE ANALYZED THE IMPACT OF CONTRIBUTIONS ON LEGISLATIVE VOTE PATTERNS AND THE EFFECTS OF CAMPAIGN SPENDING ON ELECTION OUTCOMES. THIS PAPER VIEWS POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS AS ONE FORM OF VOTING AND ATTEMPTS TO INCREASE UNDERSTANDING OF THE DETERMINANTS OF INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS TO UNDERSTANDING OF THE DETERMINANTS OF INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS TO CONTRIBUTE TO POLITICAL CANDIDATES. ITS CONCLUSION IS TWOFOLD: FROM A RESEARCHER'S VIEWPOINT, THE RESEARCH SUGGESTS THE IMPORTANCE OF AGE, WEALTH, TAX RATES, AND MARITAL STATUS AS DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY TOP U.S. WEALTH-HOLDERS; AND FROM A POLITICIAN'S VIEWPOINT, THE RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT INDIVIDUAL ECONOMIC VARIABLES SUCH AS MARGINAL TAX RATES AND WEALTH ARE MAJOR DETERMINANTS OF INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS TO CONTRIBUTE TO POLITICIANS.

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or image-related) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this "overjustification effect" can induce a partial or even net crowding out of prosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. We also identify the settings that are conducive to multiple social norms and, more generally, those that make individual actions complements or substitutes, which we show depends on whether stigma or honor is (endogenously) the dominant reputational concern. Finally, we analyze the socially optimal level of incentives and how monopolistic or competitive sponsors depart from it. Sponsor competition is shown to potentially reduce social welfare.

Individual-level explanations of electoral participation typically argue that non-voting is determined by a combination of facilitative and motivational factors. We advance the argument that, beyond individual characteristics, there are pivotal contextual features which enable or impede individual action through specific incentive structures. Thus, contextual factors influence the individual propensity to vote or to abstain. For the first time the data of Selects 2003 allows for the testing of contextual effects, at least on the cantonal level. Several multilevel analyses show that high party competition, compulsory voting, and strong Catholicism foster individual participation. The findings clearly indicate that an individual's propensity to vote is influenced by personal characteristics as well as by cantonal attributes. Adapted from the source document.

Copyright scholarship has long condemned the Copyright Term Extension Act for failing to significantly increase authors' incentive to create. Economic and psychological data combine to suggest that the increased reward supplied by the twenty-year term extension is too temporally distant to have any effect on individuals' decisions in the present. However, a small body of empirical research suggests that term extensions do lead directly to some increases in creative production. This Comment explores one possible explanation for the discrepancy between theory and practice by distinguishing individual authors from creative firms. Individuals are subject to heuristics that diminish their ability to forecast the future and reduce their valuation of the term extension's reward Corporate decisions are not necessarily guided by such heuristics; consequently, creative firms may be influenced to produce works of art by different incentives than those that influence individuals. Term extensions may thus provide an incentive for corporate producers even if their incentive effect for individuals is negligible. This Comment argues that firms, which are more responsive to term extensions, may be able to act as incentive intermediaries by passing along the greater value of a longer-term copyright. Faced with a more valuable copyright term, firms may either pay more for works up-front or use the increased profitability to offer additional opportunities for individuals to sell their works. There is limited evidence showing that firms do act this way; instead, it appears that they keep any additional profits as windfalls. As a result, society must decide whether incentivizing firm authors is as valuable a benefit of legislation as incentivizing individual authors.