This paper investigates fund-raising mechanisms based on a prize as a way to overcome free riding in the private provision of public goods, under the assumptions of income heterogeneity and incomplete information about income levels. We compare experimentally the performance of a lottery, an...

This paper investigates single and multiple prize contests as incentive mechanisms for the private provision of public goods, under the assumptions of income heterogeneity and incomplete information about income levels. We compare experimentally a one-prize contest with a three-prize contest in...

The main results of the traditional theory of private provision of public goods in the case of identical individuals are: 1) there exists a unique Nash equilibrium pattern of contributions in which everybody contributes the same amount (Bergstrom et al. [1986]); 2) this pattern is locally stable...