Many public goods that are provided by coalitions have a group-size e¤ect. Namely, people prefer to consume a public good in a larger coalition. This paper studies local public goods games with anonymous and separable group-size e¤ect. The core is nonempty when coalition feasible sets are monotonic and players’preferences over public goods satisfy a condition called cardinal connectedness. More...

This paper uses village and household survey data from South India to examine how political geography and politician identity impacts on public good provision. We provide evidence that the nature of this relationship varies by type of public goods. For high spill-over public goods residential proximity to elected representative matters. In contrast, for low spill-over public goods sharing the p...

The literature on the role of firm level innovation process mostly deals with the production of private goods as opposed to public goods. The innovation paradigms that are currently being encountered endow us with an opportunity to design a framework leading to a model of enabling firms to produce public goods. Public goods face two kinds of problems: one arising due to lack of either administr...

This paper provides a general framework for understanding consumer behavior related to goods and services that may be considered environmentally friendly, ethically produced, fairly traded, or some combination thereof. This paper generalizes the impure public good model and derives its comparative static properties. The model accounts for any number of impure public (green) goods and joint prod...

We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-ridingproof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously determines a contribution group, public goods provision level, and how to share the provision costs. The FRP-Core is always nonempty in public goods economies but does not usually achieve gl...

Many observers have argued that ethnic divisions make public goods more difficult to provide. This paper examines the provision of public goods in an economy with ethnic divisions. Households feel altruistically toward other households in their ethnic group. The amount of public goods in private contribution equilibrium is generally in decreasing in the amount of ethnic diversity. Public goods ...

The theory of public goods would be greatly simplified if it were possible to determine the optimal amount of public goods independently of the distribution of private goods among individuals. Richard Musgrave (1958, 1969) has vigorously argued for treating the allocation and distribution functions of government as distinct. But as Paul Samuelson (1955, 1969) has demonstrated, in general equlib...

Cooperation in biological, social, and economic groups is underpinned by public goods that are generated by group members at some personal cost. Theory predicts that public goods will be exploited by cheaters who benefit from the goods by not paying for them, thereby leading to the collapse of cooperation. This situation, described as the "public goods dilemma" in game theory, makes the ubiquit...

Most pure public goods like lighthouses, dams, or national defense provide utility mainly by insuring against hazardous events. Our paper focuses on this insurance character of public goods. As for private actions against hazardous events, one can distinguish between self-insurance (SI) and self-protection (SP) also in the context of public goods. For both cases of SI and SP we analyze efficien...

We study three different models in which public goods are supplied by private contributions. In one of these models, tax-financed government subsidies to private contributions will definitely increase the equilibrium supply of public goods. In the other two models, government subsidies are neutralized by offsetting changes in private contributions. We explain why it is that these models lead to...