Patronage and Public Goods Provisioning in an Unequal Land

Patronage Politics and Public Goods Provision in Africa

Many prevailing views contend that African politics are strongly influenced by vertical networks of dyadic patronage relationships that have a damaging effect on political systems, economies, and civil society. Since independence, the increasing size of many African cabinets would, following the literature, indicate a growth in political patronage networks. While these networks may increase the...

Directional learning and the provisioning of public goods

We consider an environment where players are involved in a public goods game and must decide repeatedly whether to make an individual contribution or not. However, players lack strategically relevant information about the game and about the other players in the population. The resulting behavior of players is completely uncoupled from such information, and the individual strategy adjustment dyn...

Designing public transport to foster patronage and social inclusion 1 9 CONFERENCE ON COMPETITION AND OWNERSHIP IN LAND TRANSPORT DESIGNING PUBLIC TRANSPORT TO FOSTER PATRONAGE AND SOCIAL INCLUSION

Public Health and Public Goods

It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish public health (and public health ethics) from tangentially related fields like social work. I argue that we should reclaim the more traditional conception of public health as the provision of health-related public goods. The public goods account has the advantage of establishing a relatively clear and distinctive mission for public health. It ...

Harnessing Reciprocity to Promote Cooperation and the Provisioning of Public Goods

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but benefit everyone, thus creating a social dilemma: Individual and collective interests are in tension. ...