In many empirically relevant situations agents in different groups are affected by the provision of a public characteristic in divergent ways: While for one group it represents a public good, it is a public bad for another group. Applying Cornes' and Hartley's (2007) Aggregative Game Approach,...

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...

In this paper we explore the relationship between an equitable distribution of the cost shares in public-good provision on the one hand and the core property of an allocation on the other. In particular we show that it is an inhomogeneous distribution of cost shares that motivates some coalition...

Applying a willingness to pay approach known from contingent valuation in environmental economics, we first develop an ordinally based specific measure for the size of individual sacrifice that is connected with an agent's contribution to a public good. We then construct a selection mechanism...

Since Olson's (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, the exploitation hypothesis, in which the rich shoulders the provision burden of public goods for the poor, has held sway despite empirical exceptions. To address such exceptions, we establish two alternative exploitation hypotheses based on...

In this paper, we show that progressivity (regressivity) of burden sharing in a Lindahl equilibrium is a direct consequence of gross complementarity (substitutability) between the private and the public good when the public good is taken as the numéraire. We, moreover, link the respective...

When providing public goods through voluntary contributions, a donor may introduce unilateral matching in order to reduce underprovision of the public good and thus inefficiency. By itself, however, matching benefits the donor but harms the recipient. We apply Cornes and Hartley's aggregative...

Matching mechanisms are regarded as an important instrument to bring about Pareto optimal allocations in a public good economy and to cure the underprovision problem associated with private provision of public goods. The desired Pareto optimal interior matching equilibrium, however, emerges only...

We present a rigorous, yet elementary, demonstration of the existence of a unique Lindahl equilibrium under the assumptions that characterize the standard n-player public good model. Indeed, our approach, which exploits the aggregative structure of the public good model, lends itself to a...