Free riding involves benefiting from common resources or services while avoiding contributing to their production and maintenance. Few studies have adequately investigated the propensity to overestimate the prevalence of free riding. This is a significant omission, as exaggeration of the phenomenon is often used to justify control and coercion systems. To address this gap, we investigate how the common good approach may mitigate the flaws of a system excessively focused on free-riding risk. In this conceptual paper featuring illustrative vignettes, we argue that the common good perspective is realistic and effective in preventing this excessive attention by promoting trust as an unconditional gift and a response to vulnerability. We discuss the common good perspective’s originality over the dominant approaches and propose a set of ethical and managerial recommendations that may be the best protection against this excessive focus and maybe even against free riding itself.

International migration represents a potential channel for the transmission of norms, attitudes, and values back to the home countries. In this paper, we explore how international migration affects tax morale and aversion to the free-riding of members of the household left behind in the home country. We use a rich longitudinal household-level database on Polish society (period 2007–2015) that allows us to observe social attitudes and values of individuals before and after the actual migration of a member of the household. We find that having a migrant in the household has a significant and positive effect on tax morale and increases aversion toward free-riding of stayers. We also find that migrants have a lower level of tax morale before departure compared to stayers, suggesting that international migration leads to an overall gain in pro-social behaviors.

How do states distribute the burdens of collective defense? This paper develops a network theory of burden sharing. We focus on bilateral defense cooperation agreements (DCAs), which promote cooperation in a variety of defense, military, and security issue areas. Using a computational model, we show that DCA partners’ defense spending depends on the network structure of their agreements. In bilateral terms, DCAs increase defense spending by committing states to defense activities and allowing partners to reciprocally punish free riding. However, as a state's local network of defense partnerships grows more densely connected, with many transitive “friend of a friend” relations, DCAs have the countervailing effect of reducing defense spending. The more deeply integrated states are in bilateral defense networks, the less they spend on defense. We distinguish two potential mechanisms behind this effect—one based on efficiency improvements, the other on free riding. An empirical analysis using multilevel inferential network models points more to efficiency than to free riding. Defense networks reduce defense spending, and they do so by allowing countries to produce security more efficiently.

Company brands signify a message to consumers about the quality and value of a product. Countries can also be branded. However, unlike the brands of individual firms, country brands are collective goods. The nature of country brands creates the possibility of free riding, where individual firms benefit – in terms of price or access – from the promise made by a country brand but deliver at a level lower than what is promised by the brand. Such free riding threatens the stability of what the country brand represents unless legal, governmental, or other institutions engage in activities to reduce these adverse effects. In this paper, we investigate the Chinese brand – once standing for average quality at a low price – in the light of recent recalls. We examine how country brands emerge and the incentives that firms operating in a country have to either support or not support a country brand. We also explore the implications of diese incentives for the role of various institutions, including the government, in developing, maintaining and changing a country brand and in developing and enforcing the policies, such as protection of intellectual property, necessary to support firms' efforts toward reinforcing a trusted country brand.

Edward C. Prescott has argued that mandatory saving is socially desirable because it solves the problem of people intentionally free riding and becoming a welfare burden. Inspired by Prescott's argument, we develop a model in which rational individuals choose between saving and free riding. We find that free riding is a robust outcome for a significant share of the population and that everyone, including the free riders, benefits from the elimination of free riding through mandatory saving. Our results strengthen Prescott's position that free riding is a serious problem and that mandatory saving is socially desirable.