For various reasons, governments sometimes fail to provide public goods. Private provision of such goods might then be used if it succeeds in overcoming three main problems: high organization costs, the assurance problem, and the free-rider problem. We argue that technologies that enable...

Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit-seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the...

We model firms as competing for socially responsible consumers by linking the provision of a public good (environmentally friendly or socially responsible activities) to sales of their private goods. In many cases, too little of the public good is provided but under certain conditions,...

Engaging in environmentally friendly practices and then informing the public through advertising or on the product packaging is known as ecolabeling. In this paper, we examine how effective this type of competition among firms is as a means of privately providing a public good (environmental...

This paper analyzes the private provision of public goods where consumers interact within a fixed network structure and may benefit only from their direct neighbors’ provisions. We present a proof for existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium with general best-reply functions. Our...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are long-term partnerships between the public and private sectors that usually involve the private sector undertaking investment projects that traditionally have been executed (or at least financed) and owned by the public sector. This paper considers...