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A major challenge in ecology is to understand how different species interact to determine ecosystem function, particularly in communities with large numbers of co-occurring species. We use a trait-based model of microbial litter decomposition to quantify how different taxa impact ecosystem function. Furthermore, we build a novel framework that highlights the interplay between taxon traits and environmental conditions, focusing on their combined influence on community interactions and ecosystem function. Our results suggest that the ecosystem impact of a taxon is driven by its resource acquisition traits and the community functional capacity, but that physiological stress amplifies the impact of both positive and negative interactions. Furthermore, net positive impacts on ecosystem function can arise even as microbes have negative pairwise interactions with other taxa. As communities shift in response to global climate change, our findings reveal the potential to predict the biogeochemical functioning of communities from taxon traits and interactions.

It is often assumed that power is exerted through patron–client exchanges in Bangladesh. These patron–client relationships are dispersed and multifaceted, kept together by moral closeness and tenderness. The incumbent government of Bangladesh rigged the last 2014 and 2018 national elections through the clientelist process. In Bangladesh, clientelism has become an art form that encompasses a wide variety of illegal electoral strategies and crimes. Brokers have a crucial part to play in this process because they are responsible for controlling patron–client interactions. Even while clientelism is thought of as an investment in public goods for the underprivileged, it has been demonstrating severe democratic degradation causes in countries that are still in the process of creating their democracies. This study explores how clientelism, broker dominance, and particularly the patron–client situation led Bangladesh to transition from a two-party or multiparty democratic state to a one-party dominant state that is flavored with authoritarian democracy. It also demonstrates how this has led to the emergence of a society in which free and fair election is an illusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines a collective action contest between two groups of charitably-minded, rational altruists. The groups are supporters of two political parties that oppose each other in their support for a redistributive tax and social welfare benefit. Analysis identifies an asymmetry in the incentive structure that creates a fundraising advantage for the pro-redistributive party. Big government altruists (BGAs) choose between contributing to charity (i.e., individual voluntary redistribution) and contributing to the political party that supports compulsory redistribution from all of the rich to the poor. Small government altruists (SGAs) choose between contributing to charity and contributing to the political party that tries to stop compulsory redistribution from all of the rich to the poor. In other words, while BGAs choose between individual voluntary redistribution and supporting universal compulsory redistribution, SGAs choose between individual voluntary redistribution and opposing universal compulsory redistribution. Because of this asymmetry, BGAs can advance their redistributive goals (as well as their political goals) via campaign contributing while SGAs cannot. This difference creates a fundraising advantage for the pro-redistributive party. Relative to the other group, BGAs optimize by giving more to party and less to charity and SGAs optimize by giving more to charity and less to party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classic cake cutting problem concerns the fair allocation of a heterogeneous resource among interested agents. In this paper, we study a public goods variant of the problem, where instead of competing with one another for the cake, the agents all share the same subset of the cake which must be chosen subject to a length constraint. We focus on the design of truthful and fair mechanisms in the presence of strategic agents who have piecewise uniform (i.e., approval) utilities over the cake. On the one hand, we show that the leximin solution is excludably truthful (meaning it is truthful when it can block each agent from accessing parts of the cake that the agent does not claim to desire) and moreover maximizes the guaranteed normalized egalitarian welfare among all excludably truthful and position oblivious mechanisms. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the maximum Nash welfare solution is excludably truthful for two agents (as it coincides with leximin in that case) but not in general. We also provide an impossibility result on truthfulness when blocking is not allowed, and adapt notions of representation to our setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines a public good, arguing that higher education should be considered a public good. This requires moving away from an orthodox economistic understanding of public goods. It also requires understanding the relationship between higher education as both a private good and a public good to the extent that it promotes individual flourishing necessary to the public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural infrastructure is fundamental to rural development in developing countries. Yet, rural governments endure heavier fiscal constraints than their urban counterparts. Thus, the capacity of rural residents to subsidize infrastructure supply is critical to facilitating provision. While this capability has increased, the willingness of rural inhabitants to absorb cost burdens remains low. However, the factors impacting willingness remains unexamined. This study addresses this deficiency by identifying influencing factors through the lens of "public goods theory." A field survey of 266 rural Chinese residents is conducted. Results reveal that opinions on affordability are shaped by government policy, perceptions of equitable burden-sharing, and group behavior. Situational cognition plays an important intermediary role in affecting rural residents' willingness. The "free-rider effect" is also confirmed as a factor. The findings of this study offer strategies for increasing the affordability of rural infrastructure investment in developing countries by raising the pay-for-use willingness of beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asia’s cultural heritage is increasingly threatened by climate change, environmental degradation and destructive human activities. In 2021, 10 Asian states, including China, formed the Asian Cultural Heritage Alliance (ACHA). The study utilised a mixed-method comprehensive review methodology to determine if ACHA is a regional public good or a supranational entity and assess its potential to advance the protection of Asia’s underwater cultural heritage (UCH). The results revealed that ACHA is a regional supranational entity designed to deliver public goods, notably regional cultural heritage conservation services, not a public good in and of itself. However, ACHA faces many challenges, including institutional prematureness, competing foreign policy positions, and domestic political concerns. Despite this, ACHA provides a potential new transnational governance mechanism for Asian UCH protection with profound cultural policy implications, including the refinement of regional UCH protection, enhanced funding mechanisms, the coordination of State and non-state actors, and reimagined international conferences to promote real-world outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Standing Up for Nonprofits: Advocacy on Federal, Sector-wide Issues" by Alan Abramson and Benjamin Soskis, focusing on the advocacy efforts of nonprofits for their own interests. The authors explore the challenges faced by the sector in advocating for itself, highlighting the limited resources and understanding of policymakers. They discuss the tension between promoting the public good and serving organizational interests, offering recommendations to enhance sector-wide advocacy. Overall, the book raises important questions about the nonprofit sector's advocacy efforts and its role in policy-making. [Extracted from the article]

This article assesses the arguments of the authors in terms of the challenge that diversity poses to polities. Appreciating the comparative, contextual and iterative method of the authors that entwines the normative and the empirical, this article suggests that the arguments of the book may be weakened by an overlooking of how diversity fares in the face of widening material inequalities and the workings of the neoliberal market. This article questions the use of the term “governance” of diversity and suggests that it inadvertently suggests a technocratic and managerial approach to diversity on account of the neoliberal underpinnings of the term. Finally, it welcomes the case for religion as public good that the authors make but suggests that this can only flourish with an accompaniment of public goods such as health, housing and education, publicly provisioned by the exchequer for all citizens and not subject to commoditization for individual consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is generally agreed that higher education is a public good and produces public goods, it remains unclear what this means. An important reason for the unclarity is the conceptual ambiguity and cultural nuances of the concept of the public good in higher education. Coupled with the Western dominance of discourse in higher education and language challenges in translation, the ambiguity and nuances further result in challenges for studies that explore and compare the public good of higher education across contexts. This paper employs a lexical comparison approach to address these challenges, all of which have been encountered by the comparative research project that leads to this Special Issue. Taking Japanese, Chinese and English as examples, it identifies key terms in the three languages, reveals contextual underpinnings of the key terms and the cultural distance between the terms, and discusses the implications of the lexical comparison. The paper argues that this lexical comparison has been effective in this particular analysis and the comparative research project, and has the potential to contribute to comparisons of other higher education topics involving multiple languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores contributions to public good(s) in higher education in Ontario, Canada. In a break from the trend of this special issue, this paper does not offer a comprehensive national study. Rather, it is based on a multiple case study conducted in a single predominantly English-speaking province, Ontario, drawing on 19 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2019 with policymakers and university staff, including those in academic and executive roles. The analysis offers novel insights into contemporary understandings of public good(s) in general, and Ontarian higher education's contributions to the public good, and its relationship with the state and global community. Participants highlighted three dimensions of the public good: economic, knowledge-based, and social. While participants from the provincial and national spheres focused more on narratives of province- or nation-building through economic development and social mobility, university staff additionally highlighted knowledge-based contributions, emphasizing an educated citizenry, critical debate, and curiosity-driven research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex relationship between higher education and the concept of public goods in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, with a particular focus on Chile. Through an extensive literature review, the study examines the evolving meanings of public, public/common/global goods in Spanish culture in the context of higher education, highlighting the region's unique historical and socio-political challenges. Using an interpretive methodology, the research captures the perceptions of 55 academics from two public universities in Chile. The findings reveal a multifaceted view of the role of public universities, intertwined with notions of public goods and global public goods. Despite the challenges posed by privatisation and market forces, the unwavering commitment of these institutions to the production of public goods and to social responsibility and societal transformation stands out. The research highlights the role of universities as local problem solvers and global change agents. It concludes that while Chilean public universities face market dynamics, government policies and fiscal constraints, their commitment to societal development remains resolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses understandings of higher education and the public good in the context of Finland. A lexical-based comparison of public goods terminology reveals that the Finnish translation of public good—julkishyödyke—is used in comparatively recent (post-1970s) scholarship, mainly limited to the fields of economics, forestry and agriculture. It is notably absent in discussions of higher education. Instead, universities' contribution to the public good is expressed as sivistys, service, social impact and national development. The second half of the paper discusses findings from a qualitative study of university staff and policymaker understandings of public good(s) (n = 21). Participants framed the contribution of universities to the public good as sivistys, service and social impact and also highlighted the dimension of social equality. These goods were viewed as applicable to local, national and global levels, flowing both out of and into Finland, thus benefiting everyone. As such, responses were closely aligned with the UNESCO (2015) definition of higher education as a global common good. Recent higher education policies that are based on the logic of higher education as a private good (education export, tuition fees for international students) threaten this model, revealing a conflict in the role of the state as protector of the public good at the national level and promoter of higher education as a private good at the global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generosity through donation plays a crucial role in reducing inequality and influencing human behavior. However, previous research on donation has overlooked individuals' acceptance of the extent of inequality, which acts as a trigger for donation. To address this gap, this paper systematically explores the impact of donation based on inequality tolerance on the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods game. Specifically, donation occurs only when an individual's payoff advantage exceeds her inequality tolerance. The results show that donation patterns are crucial for the emergence and stability of cooperation. In the enduring period, the defector-to-cooperator donation pattern helps to form cooperative clusters. In the expanding period, cooperator-to-cooperator, defector-to-defector, and defector-to-cooperator donation patterns create a stable three-layer structure through self-organization, providing a payoff advantage to boundary cooperators. As donation ratio increases, the three-layer structure provides a greater payoff advantage to boundary cooperators, leading to an increase in cooperation. As inequality tolerance increases, changes in donation patterns weaken the three-layer structure, causing cooperation to decrease or disappear through discontinuous phase transitions. Subsequently, all critical points of discontinuous phase transitions are identified by specific spatial configurations. In addition, the influence of donation patterns on the evolution of cooperation is robust, even in heterogeneous small-world networks. This paper offers valuable insights into the dynamics of cooperation evolution and the role of donation in shaping behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reputation and punishment are significant guidelines for regulating individual behavior in human society, and those with a good reputation are more likely to be imitated by others. In addition, society imposes varying degrees of punishment for behaviors that harm the interests of groups with different reputations. However, conventional pairwise interaction rules and the punishment mechanism overlook this aspect. Building on this observation, this paper enhances a spatial public goods game in two key ways: (1) We set a reputation threshold and use punishment to regulate the defection behavior of players in low-reputation groups while allowing defection behavior in high-reputation game groups. (2) Differently from pairwise interaction rules, we combine reputation and payoff as the fitness of individuals to ensure that players with both high payoff and reputation have a higher chance of being imitated. Through simulations, we find that a higher reputation threshold, combined with a stringent punishment environment, can substantially enhance the level of cooperation within the population. This mechanism provides deeper insight into the widespread phenomenon of cooperation that emerges among individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deepest foundation of our democratic crisis is our increasing human interdependence. That interdependence creates increasing needs for 'free-use goods': goods that, once produced, anyone can use without paying (other names: "public goods," "non-excludable goods"). Such goods produce the classic "free-rider" problems to which the most efficient solution in societies of strangers is usually government provision through taxes or regulation, both of which depend on a combination of voluntarism (based on duty and solidarity) and legitimate coercion. More interdependence creates more free-rider problems, which require more government intervention/coercion. Our eighteenth-century democratic mechanisms were not designed to legitimate the amount of state coercion we now need. To bolster legitimacy, we need to embrace the logic of free-use goods and replace one-way with recursive representation, the principle of distinction with more descriptive representation, corruption with clean institutions, and legislative-centric democracy with a full representative system approach, all drawing on our collective intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the provision of m ≥ 1 divisible public goods, relatively weak restrictions on the domain of a strategy-proof social choice function are identified that ensure that its range is bounded. Domain restrictions are also identified for which strategy-proofness implies that the range and the option sets of a social choice function are compact. To illustrate the usefulness of these results, it is shown how a theorem about generalized median voter schemes due to Barberà, Massó, and Serizawa can be established without their assumption that the range of a social choice function is compact provided that the tops of the preferences are not restricted to be finite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While inequality in resource endowments has been shown to affect cooperation levels in groups, much of this evidence comes from studies of within-group inequality. In an online public goods experiment, we instead examine the effects of payoff-irrelevant inequality in resources between groups on cooperation within equal groups, i.e. the effect of mere exposure to inequality. When all groups are poor or rich, their contribution behaviour is very similar. Relative inequality, when poor and rich groups coexist, leads to lower contributions in rich groups. We find suggestive evidence that this may be related to stereotypes about the rich contributing less than the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role of big tech in becoming an engine of capturing public power. We focus on tech capitalist classes and their determination to capture both the economic benefit and the political decision. First, the article does so by bringing to the fore input from Weber's political capitalism to explain the linkages between state and tech capitalists as the illustration of a structural dependence where lobbying activities are intensified. Second, pushing further the generally admitted idea of states and markets being co-constitutive allows to broaden the concept of political capitalism to include not only rent seeking, property rights' issues, and surplus extraction mechanisms but also models of governance. The study suggests that in the case of digital capitalism, property rights on productive resources, originally private while also publicly subsidized, can make big tech not just shapers of common values but also providers of public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hybridization of digital commons and public administration institutions led by bureaucratic entrepreneurs is a relatively recent phenomenon that has received limited attention in the literature. The term coined to describe this evolution is the "commonization" of digital public goods and services. I define commonization as the integration of shared property, peer production, and self‐governance into public administration. To explore the democratizing potential of commonization, I conducted a qualitative study comparing two case studies in France and Spain (Barcelona). My approach involves 44 semistructured interviews and online observations analyzed through the analytical framework of institutional work. The findings highlight five factors that enhance, and two that hinder, citizen power in co‐governance arrangements. In conclusion, I identify the theoretical and practical implications of commonizing digital public goods and services, providing valuable insights for practitioners and scholars, particularly in the New Public Governance paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not clear, a priori, whether a centralized or decentralized institutional arrangement is better at providing public goods. This study investigates how decentralization of regulatory authority affects public good provision, focusing on food safety. Using a natural experiment that transfers food safety regulatory authority over the food processing and manufacturing sector from provincial to city‐level governments, we find a 51% decrease in the average number of food safety incidents within cities that experienced the decentralization reform. Decentralization reduces food safety incidents by rectifying information asymmetry in food safety regulations and by increasing local food safety laws and regulations. Additional analyses show that decentralization primarily improves the food safety of larger and more experienced firms, and it has not harmed the total revenue of large‐scale food processing and manufacturing firms. Our study demonstrates the importance of information available to regulatory authorities in food safety regulation and highlights the role of local information in the decentralized provision of public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the effects of historical and contemporary ethnolinguistic diversity on socio-economic development in Afghanistan. Using a dataset of Afghan provinces, we find that historical ethnolinguistic borders are strongly associated with income, provision of public goods, and political preferences in Afghanistan. Pashtun areas exhibit higher levels of income and public goods provision as well as political support for the incumbent. There has been a persistent rule of Pashtun leaders in Afghanistan during the last three centuries. Furthermore, we instrument measures of contemporary ethnolinguistic diversity by the diversity of archaeological sites that belong to different ancient and medieval empires. We argue that higher levels of contemporary diversity are likely to induce lower levels of conflict, higher levels of income and trust, and lower levels of individualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The embedding effect represents one of the most challenging problems of the contingent valuation (CV) method. The purpose of this study is to address the issue of embedding effect in the context of museums, by estimating the size and extent of the problem. A CV study conducted in Denmark asked respondents to evaluate both the Danish museum-system (inclusive good) and the specific local museum in their municipality of residence (embedded good). Typically, an equal or very close willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the two goods would indicate the presence of an embedding effect. However, we show that this will only be the case for some respondents, while for others the similarity between the two WTP reflects an exclusive interest for the local museum. We demonstrate the existence of these two different types of respondents by using a latent class model where respondents are clustered based on answers to the CV survey. Consequently, the aggregate WTP and the bias associated with the embedding effect are estimated. Our results have implications in terms of the reliability of CV studies and its implementation in actual policy issues, demonstrating that the right questions and techniques will facilitate the separation of 'true' answers from biased ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to realize on-demand delivery drone networks present a stark example of how the technology industry seeks to dominate new markets, regardless of societal consequences. Analyzing the most advanced of these efforts—Google Wing's operations in Australia since 2017—we identify the instrumental role of narratives of technological inevitability (of tech expansion, and societal adaptation) in catalyzing new sky-based commerce. Yet the interest of this case study lies in a twist. Google Wing's rollout in Australia's capital, Canberra, initially proceeded as a textbook example of tech expansion. However, citizen engagement and public governance dramatically intervened and, we argue, disrupted the logic of technological inevitability. This article is the first to analyze these dynamics, many of which originated with Bonython Against Drones (BAD), a community action group forged from those who first lived under Google's food delivery drones. The article exposes the flawed logic of technological inevitability as the enabling force of tech expansion; characterizes the governance failures that help install corporate visions for public goods; animates the potentialities of communities living with new technologies; and identifies the sky itself, as both a public commons and a vital, living habitat, as a key future locus for participatory governance. This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spatial public goods games, groups consisting solely of defectors do not benefit. Consequently, intelligent defectors are inclined to incur the cost of punishing other defectors to enable cooperators to flourish within the group, thereby safeguarding their own advantages. Drawing from real-world observations where early preparation often dictates future success, we integrated probabilistic punishment into the public goods game and analyzed two scenarios. In the first scenario, a probabilistic punishment mechanism was established, wherein the higher the cost was of monitoring and enforcement, the greater was the probability of punishment. In the second scenario, a compensation and fine distribution mechanism was introduced alongside probabilistic punishment, where the outcome of the punishment determined whether the smart defector recovered part of the fine or rewarded cooperators with additional benefits. This incentivized smart defectors to judiciously assess the punishment cost required to effectively protect their interests. The study demonstrated that both mechanisms significantly enhanced cooperation, with the probabilistic punishment model involving fine distribution and compensation proving more effective than simple probabilistic punishment alone. These results offer novel insights into the dynamics of probabilistic punishment and the role of fine distribution in fostering cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stylized experiments, the public goods game and its variants thereof, have taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to cooperate (or contribute to shared resources) more than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing explanations for this phenomenon: Either cooperating is an innate human trait (the prosocial preference hypothesis) or a transitory effect while learning the game (the confused learner hypothesis). We use large-scale experimental data in the two-player version of the public goods game--the prisoner's dilemma--from an experimental design to distinguish between these two hypotheses. By monitoring the effects of zealots (persistently cooperating bots) and varying the participants' awareness of them, we find a considerably more complex scenario than previously reported. People indeed have a prosocial bias, but not to the degree that they always forego taking action to increase their profit. While our findings end the simplistic theorizing of prosociality, an observed positive, cooperative response to zealots has actionable policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewilding is a conservation concept and practice which has gained traction over the past two decades, and is often perceived as a powerful tool to reverse anthropogenic ecological degradation. In the UK, Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS) have introduced the idea of 'public money for public goods', making some rewilding initiatives more viable for landholders. Many conservation organisations work with landholders to promote rewilding as part of local conservation strategies, but there remains a lack of understanding of landholder perceptions and attitudes towards rewilding. This research used semi-structured interviews based on the gaps identified in the literature to explore these aspects in a sample population of 8 landholders in Surrey, UK. Thematic analysis interpreted the importance of emergent patterns and implications in relation to existing literature. This research found that landholders associate many different meanings towards rewilding. These perceptions fall along two spectra, ranging from passive to active forms of rewilding and with different levels of impact on human activities. Landholder valuations of rewilding are profoundly influenced by their perceptions of its meaning, with more favourable attitudes expressed towards 'low-impact', active forms of rewilding. Concern was expressed about the need to balance rewilding goals with food security. This emphasises that understanding local views is essential to improve consideration of practical constraints, whilst helping to reduce polarisation and mistrust about rewilding. Conservation organisations should facilitate collaboration among landholders to kickstart the implementation of acceptable and context-specific forms of rewilding, playing a key role in achieving local and national nature recovery targets. Key policy highlights: Recognising and incorporating local perspectives, needs, and expertise into land management decision-making is crucial for positive relationships between practitioners and advocates of rewilding and thus scheme success. Encouraging dialogue and collaboration among landholders and local conservation organisations would foster joint rewilding efforts based on shared values and best practices, helping to prevent mistrust and unlock the ecosystem services associated with this conservation approach. Enhancing landholder awareness of funding sources, in collaboration with external organisations, provides an opportunity to implement rewilding whilst addressing economic constraints. Embracing the diverse nature of rewilding, adapting it to context, and including people in its implementation, are essential for effective delivery of rewilding actions by landholders and conservation organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan is a profoundly insecure country, with a very high rate of insurgent violence affecting large swathes of the population. Despite contributing to physical and economic insecurity across the country, Taliban insurgents have succeeded in creating what we call the "paradox of the heavy-handed insurgent." Insurgents use attacks on government-controlled areas to generate public support by fostering a reputation for effective security provision for the civilian population under its control. For civilians who have a strong unmet need for physical security – especially those in rural and contested communities – heavy-handed insurgents are preferable to government forces who are perceived as either incompetent or unwilling to provide governance. We test this argument using data from the 2018 Asia Society Survey of the Afghan People. We find that the most important factor driving sympathy for the Taliban among Afghan Pashtuns is their sense of insecurity where they live. This indicates that an insurgent group that wears down government forces and weakens their ability to provide public goods and services can actually benefit by appearing as the more viable alternative for governance despite their heavy-handed tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective actions aimed at achieving goals such as resource sustainability and environmental protection often face conflicting interests between individuals and groups. These social dilemmas can be modeled using public goods games and collective risk dilemmas. However, in reality, multiple generations share a common pool of resources, leading to high costs for today's overexploitation that impacts future generations' welfare. This delayed effect creates a multigenerational conflict. To address this, we develop a coupled social-ecological coevolutionary model by establishing a relationship between individual payoffs and regional environmental quality. Our goal is to study how cooperative behaviors spread in a public goods game with environmental feedback and to identify the factors influencing this spread. We achieve this by examining the mechanisms behind certain phases and phase transitions, monitoring the spatial distribution of strategies, and assessing the environmental quality of all regions. Our findings reveal some counterintuitive results. For instance, despite cooperators' ability to enhance the environment, the overall level of cooperation in the system sometimes decreases. This is linked to cooperative clusters being invaded by defectors within the clusters' cracks. Additionally, the destructive power of defection and the cost of cooperation have more complex effects on the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation is a representative altruistic behavior in which individuals contribute public goods to benefit their neighborhoods and even larger communities in social networks. The defective behavior is more likely to bring higher payoffs than the cooperative behavior, which makes the cooperative behavior hard to maintain and sustain. Many mechanisms were proposed to promote cooperation within a social dilemma, in which some recent studies introduced the impact of dynamically changing environments on players' payoffs and strategies in social-ecological systems, and evolutionary-ecological systems. However, degree heterogeneity, an important structural property of many real-world complex networks such as social networks, academic collaboration networks, and communication networks, is rarely explored and studied in such eco-evolutionary games. In this research, we propose a Public Goods Game model on social networks with environmental feedback and analyze how the environmental factor and network structure affect the evolution of cooperation. It is found that as the initial environmental factors and the cooperation-enhancement defection-degradation ratio increase, the steady cooperation level of the social network significantly increases, and the dynamic environment will eventually evolve into a high-return environment; On the other hand, even if the initial environmental benefit coefficient is high, when the cooperation-enhancement defection-degradation ratio is less than a threshold, the dynamic environment will gradually degrade into a low-return environment. The steady cooperation level of the social network first gradually increases as the network structure becomes more heterogeneous, but it will decrease once the heterogeneity of the social network exceeds a certain threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to public life has been one of the most important achievements of modernity. It was a result of long and painful civil struggles for dignity in a democratic public sphere. While de jure we are all welcome in the public sphere, de facto rapid processes of fragmentation and numerous contexts of misinformation insulate the actual chances of meaningful contribution to public life. Platform users are aggressively approached as consumers of goods and services and continuously stimulated to produce large quantities of any content, just to feed the voracious platforms. The sobering truth is that many people on the private high-tech platforms do not act like true democrats, but like private individuals who pursue very personal aims. At the same time, a private person does not have a mandate to act in the public interest of the rest of the citizens. For these reasons, we turn to information as a public good and public responsibility in this special issue. It is about media as a public service that allows democracy to keep centre stage within a polity. When citizens interact with relevant public information, they build the capacity to control their political environment, to form informed opinions and act upon them. When this basic desideratum is not structurally at the core of society, one cannot even start to consider democracy as the first course of action for the generations to come. Information as a public good is not a thing of nature, but a purposeful action. We take this stance when we approach information as a public good, rather than some residual category of market failure. The scope of this special issue is to analyse and explore the resources and institutional settings that allow information to thrive as a public good in the European contemporary informational ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information as a public good is not a thing of nature, but a purposeful action. In my contribution, I explore an international association that got institutionalised around the idea of information as a public good by means of lucrative cooperation between public service broadcasters. It emerged after the Second World War, in a world where public services would become the norm rather than the exception, and has continued to a time when priorities switched fundamentally towards profit and liberalisation. The object of study is the European Broadcasting Union, the largest association of public service media providers in Europe and beyond, servicing more than one billion people as audiences via its members. In order to understand whether EBU's institutional practices still prioritise information as a public good or have moved towards a more neo-lib focus, I undertook an institutional analysis based on secondary data. The research shows that the combination of a neo-lib corporate layer with voluntary working groups from national PSMs makes EBU particularly successful; it looks like a new public management dream come true, except that EBU is not an accountable public organisation. Through the NGO structure, corporate management and voluntary work, it opens large avenues of cooperation for professionals to innovate together, at the end of the day enhancing information as a public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of globalization, the role of women in political and social governance has garnered increasing attention. This study utilizes large-scale random sample data from the agricultural census and employs various treatment effect models to explore the impact of female cadres on the provision of elderly care public goods in villages and the underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that female cadres significantly enhance the provision of elderly care public goods within villages. This result remains robust even after conducting various robustness tests and addressing endogeneity issues. Further investigation reveals significant heterogeneity in the impact of female cadres on elderly care public goods provision. In the eastern regions, female cadres have a greater absolute effect, while in the western regions, their marginal impact is more pronounced. Additionally, female cadres play a more significant role in villages with weaker collective action strength. We also explore the heterogeneous treatment effects related to the propensity scores of female cadres within villages. The impact, initially insignificant in villages with lower scores, becomes significant, positive, and stable as scores rise. The positive impact also varies significantly with the proportion of female cadres in the village, indicating an optimal ratio for maximizing their positive effect. The study also unveils that female cadres positively influence elderly care public goods provision by enhancing collective economy and playing a role in poverty reduction. These findings offer rich policy implications for maximizing the role of female cadres in the provision of elderly care public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the current debate about competition and industrial policies, by illustrating their complementary role in fostering competitiveness and economic growth. Further market integration combined with effective competition policy can unleash the long-term competitive potential of EU firms. Effective competition in domestic markets contributes to the global competitiveness of firms, by incentivizing them to be more efficient and innovative. Preventing inefficient exercise of market power benefits final consumers as well as firms that have access to inputs of higher quality at lower costs. Pro-competitive industrial policies are required to realize the competitive potential of EU firms, notably in the areas of innovation, technological adoption, and decarbonization, characterized by externalities, miscoordination, public goods, and uncertainty. Similarly, public intervention is required to achieve greater economic resilience efficiently, while considering inevitable interdependencies in the global economy. A balance must be struck between avoiding harmful trade wars and supporting EU firms in a challenging international environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incentive institutions that reward cooperators and punish free-riders are often used to promote cooperation in public goods games. We show that for incentives of intermediate size, a sanctioning institution that punishes the worst players can sustain full cooperation and that a rewarding institution can promote cooperation only if lower contributors also have the chance to win the reward. Furthermore, if the incentive institution can provide both reward and punishment, then it should use reward as much as possible. The group welfare is maximized when the punishment is just barely larger than the minimum required to obtain the full contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how party fragmentation and electoral competition relate to the outcome of environmental policy. It is assumed that when elections happen the electoral punishment and incentives will be distributed. Specifically, when there are high number of effective number parties (ENP) in the legislature, it brings competition to the incumbent to provide more public goods. Hence, the electoral competition and party fragmentation will bring more provision of public goods. Using these assumptions, the electoral competition theory provides basic pieces of information to predict the effect of electoral competition on environmental policy outcome; a high ENP will provide a better outcome of environmental policy. Taking Indonesia as our case selection, we discovered a positive association between the number of effective parties and energy efficiency, such as LED, and a negative correlation between the usage of wood for domestic fuel. This means that political competition such as electoral competition promotes better outcome for environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of government versus private sector provision of insurance in managing risks such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, and health crises. It discusses market failures, information asymmetries, and correlated risks that can destabilize private insurers, leading to government intervention. The text highlights the historical justifications for government involvement in insurance markets, focusing on issues like adverse selection, moral hazard, and the need for public programs in catastrophic insurance. It also delves into the evolving dynamics between government and private sector roles in insurance provision, emphasizing the importance of ongoing research to ensure the resilience and stability of insurance markets. [Extracted from the article]

This paper presents a novel perspective on an evolving policy area. The UK's withdrawal from the EU has led to the creation of a new Agriculture Act and proposals for significant changes to the way farming subsidies are structured in England. Underpinned by a 'public money for public goods' approach, where public goods are those outputs from the farm system which are not rewarded by markets, yet which provide benefits to many members of society. New schemes include the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway, where certain aspects of farm animal health and welfare (FAHW) will be subsidised through government support, raising a much-debated issue in the literature regarding the representation of FAHW as a public good. For policy to be responsive to societal demands and accountable to citizens, understanding public attitudes and preferences towards FAHW as a public good, and how the public might prioritise this in relation to a wider suite of environmental public goods from farming, is important. An online survey of 521 members of the UK public was conducted and analysed with descriptive statistics and ordered logistic regression. Findings reveal low awareness of the changing agricultural policy context, but strong support for public money being used to provide public goods, particularly for FAHW. Findings also indicate a need for more effective public communication of farming and FAHW issues from farming stakeholders to ensure public policy in this domain is responsive and accountable to its citizens. Further work is needed to inform future debates and engagement surrounding FAHW, including through which combination of funding mechanisms (public or private) it is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]