Optimal Altruism in Public Good Provision
نویسندگان
چکیده
We present a model of altruistically-minded– yet rational– players contributing to a public good. A key feature is the tension between altruism and crowding-out effects. We present three main results: (1) More altruistic behaviour often reduces social welfare; (2) It is almost always optimal for a player to act more selfishly than her true preference; (3) A player’s optimal altruistic commitment is often low or zero– even with strongly altruistic preferences. Applications to a range of public good problems, including climate policy, are discussed. Our results highlight that it will generally be diffi cult to infer social preferences from observed behaviour.
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تاریخ انتشار 2014