We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identicalindividual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric andconcave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles...

This note develops a method of recovering individual preferences, and of obtaining money-metricindividual welfare comparisons, from demand functions generated by Cournot-Nash equilibria ingames with public goods.

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one's wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption. We...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption....

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public goodthat avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is in-creased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the...

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

We examine whether an economy can have a bad (small or no formal sector, hightaxes) as well as a good (small or no informal sector, low taxes) equilibrium...

This paper provides an analytical framework for exploring the relationshipbetween equity and efficiency for two riparians sharing a transboundary river.Decreasing marginal productivities of water make a noncooperative approach inefficientwhen water is scarce. If the upstream riparian uses its...

We extend the simple model of voluntary public good provision toallow for two or more public goods, and explore the new possibilitiesthat arise in this setting. We show that, when there are many publicgoods, voluntary contrib...