Profit (f)or the Public Good?

Vaccines: policy for public good or private profit?

Patents, profit and the public good: the caseof a 19th-century artificial limb manufacturer.

© 2016 Joule Inc. or its licensors CMAJ 1 Médecins Sans Frontières recently expressed concern that patent provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership would make it harder for people to access affordable drugs.1 The challenge of balancing profit with the public good is a familiar one in the history of medicine. For example, the 1847 code of ethics of the American Medical Association (AMA) deemed...

Profit-Maximizing Sale of a Discrete Public Good: linear equilibria in the private-information subscription game

We analyze a symmetric Bayesian game in which two players individually contribute to fund a discrete public good; contributions are refunded if they do not meet a threshold set by the seller of the good. We provide a general characterization of symmetric equilibrium strategies that are continuous and nonconstant over the set of values for which the good has a positive chance of provision. Piece...

Public Profit Sharing*

Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income positions as determined in the process of wage negotiations. It is shown that the introduction of public pr...

Not-for-profit Provision of Public Services

Not-for-profit firms are greatly over-represented in the childcare, medical care, education and care for the aged sectors where service providing workers, as well as purchasers, seem to care about the level or quality of service being provided. Since all individuals who care about service levels receive nonexcludable benefits, these services have a public good element. Such care can be used to ...