Theoretical Economics

Journal of the Econometric Society

Edited by: Federico Echenique • ISSN (e): 1555-7561 • ISSN (print): 1933-6837

Theoretical Economics: May, 2011, Volume 6, Issue 2

Contributing or free-riding? Voluntary participation in a public good economy

https://doi.org/10.3982/TE567
p. 219-256

, Hideo Konishi

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-riding-proof 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 global efficiency. The FRP-Core has support from both cooperative and noncooperative games. In particular, it is equivalent to the set of perfectly coalition-proof Nash equilibria (Bernheim, Peleg, and Whinston, 1987) of a dynamic game with players' participation decisions followed by a common agency game of public goods provision. We illustrate various properties of the FRP-Core with an example. We also show that the equilibrium level of public goods shrinks to zero as the economy is replicated.


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