This paper investigates theoretically and experimentally the social benefits and cost to have an endogenous punishment-enforcing authority in public goods game. An authority is chosen among members of a society via an imperfectly discriminating contest prior to a public goods game. Once chosen the authority has a large degree of discretion to inflict punishment. Our theoretical result shows that an efficiency gain from having the endogenous authority always comes with a social cost from competing for being the authority. The larger the society is, however, the bigger the efficiency gain and the smaller the rent dissipation. The completely efficient outcome can be approximated as the size of society tends to infinity. The experimental results confirm that the presence of endogenous authority for a given group size increases the public goods contributions and the efficiency gain is significantly bigger in a larger group.

中文翻译：

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公共物品游戏中的内生权威与执法

本文从理论和实验上研究了在公共物品博弈中具有内生的惩罚执行权的社会收益和成本。在公益游戏之前，通过不完全有区别的竞赛从社会成员中选择权威。一旦被选定，当局将有很大的酌处权施加惩罚。我们的理论结果表明，拥有内生权威的效率提高总是伴随着竞争成为权威的社会成本。但是，社会越大，效率收益越大，租金耗散也越小。随着社会规模趋于无穷大，可以得出完全有效的结果。