Consider a non-governmental organization (NGO) that can invest in a public good. Should the government or the NGO own the public project? In an incomplete contracting framework with split-the-difference bargaining, Besley and Ghatak (2001) argue that the party who values the public good most...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

Consider two parties who can make non-contractible investments in the provision of a public good. Who should own the physical assets needed to provide the public good? In the literature it has been argued that the party who values the public good most should be the owner, regardless of the...

The for-profit hospital is in the minority numerically in all developed countries. Although the for-profits' market share has been quite stable for decades, for-profit chains have grown in share and influence in the United States. By contrast, for-profit chains have made few inroads in other...

We study the provision of an excludable public good to discuss whether the imposition of participation constraints is desirable. It is shown that this question may equivalently be cast as follows: should a firm that produces a public good receive tax revenues, or face a self-financing...

A community faces the obligation of providing an indivisible public good that each of its members is able to provide at a certain cost. The solution is to rely on the member who can provide the public good at the lowest cost, with a due compensation from the other members.This problem has been...

We use a laboratory experiment to identify the impact of risk in the private and public dimensions of social investments. In variants of a public good game, we separate the return a subject's investment generates for herself vs. the return to others. We find a detrimental effect of risk on...