Sharing the Cost of a Public Good: an Incentive-Constrained Axiomatic Approach

We study the problem of provision and cost-sharing of a public good in large economies where exclusion, complete or partial, is possible. We search for incentive-constrained efficient allocation rules that display fairness properties. Population monotonicity says that an increase in population should not be detrimental to anyone. Demand monotonicity states that an increase in the demand for the public good (in the sense of a first-order stochastic dominance shift in the distribution of preferences) should not be detrimental to any agent whose preferences remain unchanged. Under suitable domain restrictions, there exists a unique incentive-constrained efficient and demand-monotonic allocation rule: the so-called serial rule. In the binary public good case, the serial rule is also the only incentive-constrained efficient and population-monotonic rule.

Sharing the Cost of a Public Good without Subsidies

We study the construction of a social ordering function for the case of a public good financed by contributions from the population, and we extend the analysis of Maniquet and Sprumont (2004) to the case when contributions cannot be negative, i.e. agents cannot receive subsidies from others.

Should a non-rival public good always be provided centrally?

This paper discusses the problem of optimal design of a jurisdiction structure from the view point of a utilitarian social planner when individuals with identical utility functions for a non-rival public good and private consumption have private information about their contributive capacities. It shows that the superiority of a centralized provision of a non-rival public good over a federal one does not always hold. Specifically, when differences in individuals’ contributive capacities are large, it is better to provide the public good in several distinct jurisdictions rather than to pool these jurisdictions into a single one. In the specific situation where individuals have logarithmic utilities, the paper provides a complete characterization of the optimal jurisdiction structure in the two-type case.

Decision‐Making in Public Good Dilemmas: Theory and Agent‐Based Simulation

In many real world contexts individuals find themselves in situations where they have to decide between options of behaviour that serve a collective purpose or behaviours which satisfy one’s private interests, ignoring the collective. In some cases the underlying social dilemma (Dawes, 1980) is solved and we observe collective action (Olson, 1965). In others social mobilisation is unsuccessful. The central topic of social dilemma research is the identification and understanding of mechanisms which yield to the observed cooperation and therefore resolve the social dilemma. It is the purpose of this thesis to contribute this research field for the case of public good dilemmas. To do so, existing work that is relevant to this problem domain is reviewed and a set of mandatory requirements is derived which guide theory and method development of the thesis. In particular, the thesis focusses on dynamic processes of social mobilisation which can foster or inhibit collective action. The basic understanding is that success or failure of the required process of social mobilisation is determined by heterogeneous individual preferences of the members of a providing group, the social structure in which the acting individuals are contained, and the embedding of the individuals in economic, political, biophysical, or other external contexts. To account for these aspects and for the involved dynamics the methodical approach of the thesis is computer simulation, in particular agent-based modelling and simulation of social systems. Particularly conductive are agent models which ground the simulation of human behaviour in suitable psychological theories of action. The thesis develops the action theory HAPPenInGS (Heterogeneous Agents Providing Public Goods) and demonstrates its embedding into different agent-based simulations. The thesis substantiates the particular added value of the methodical approach: Starting out from a theory of individual behaviour, in simulations the emergence of collective patterns of behaviour becomes observable. In addition, the underlying collective dynamics may be scrutinised and assessed by scenario analysis. The results of such experiments reveal insights on processes of social mobilisation which go beyond classical empirical approaches and yield policy recommendations on promising intervention measures in particular.

Recreational access to private land in England and Wales: public good; private interest

Since the Eighteenth Century the protection of public recreational access to private land has been maintained by the state through a mixture of legal rights of passage and the safeguarding of certain de facto access rights. While this situation has been modified in the last fifty years to facilitate some formalisation of access arrangements and landowner compensation in areas of high recreational pressure and low legal accessibility, recent policies indicate that a shift from public to private rights is underway. At the core of this paradigm shift are the new access payment schemes introduced as part of the restructuring of the European Common Agricultural Policy. Under these schemes landowners are now paid for 'supplying' recreational access, with the state, as the former upholder of citizen rights, now assuming the duplicitous position of further underwriting private property ownership through the effective commodification of access, while simultaneously proclaiming significant improvements in citizens' access rights.

Conformism and reciprocity in public good provision

People contribute more to experimental public goods the more others contribute, a tendency called “crowding-in.” We propose a novel experimental design to distinguish two possible causes of crowding-in: reciprocity, the usual explanation, and conformity, a neglected alternative. Subjects are given the opportunity to react to contributions of a payoff-irrelevant group, in addition to their own group. We find evidence of conformity, accounting for roughly 1/3 of crowding-in.

Informal sanctions and conditional cooperation: : A natural experiment on voluntary contributions to a public good.

In a natural experiment, this paper studies the impact of an informal sanctioning mechanism on individuals’ voluntary contribution to a public good. Cross-country skiers’ actual cash contributions in two ski resorts, one with and one without an informal sanctioning system, are used. I find the contributing share to be higher in the informal sanctioning system (79 percent) than in the non-sanctioning system (36 percent). Previous studies in one-shot public good situations have found an increasing conditional contribution (CC) function, i.e. the relationship between expected average contributions of other group members and the individual’s own contribution. In contrast, the present results suggest that the CC-function in the non-sanctioning system is non-increasing at high perceived levels of others’ contribution. This relationship deserves further testing in lab.

School choice, religion and the public good

This paper discusses the issue of school choice. I contend that arguments for choice through vouchers based on the perceived benefits of religious schooling is based on a narrow set of research, which is potentially misleading with regards to the role religious schools play in establishing democratic values and the common good. This paper seeks to demonstrate through as comparative discussion of U.S. and Australian examples the problematic nature of arguments for school choice based on the perceived advantages of religious schools.

Doing the ultimate public good through teacher education

It is argued here that the many public goods associated with education are derivatives of an ultimate good. This ultimate good is the overall purpose of life in general and is similar to a telos as understood in ancient Greek culture. This paper reviews the notions of ‘good' and telos, and examines implications of Bauman’s analysis of our present individualizing era, the role of personal meaning making and the nature of education. It is then argued that preservice teachers can do the ultimate public good in a postmodern society, by articulating a developed personal, professional perspective that expresses a purpose (telos) of life.