One important determinant of voluntary contributions to public goods is the value of the public good relative to that of the forgone private good. Isaac, Walker and Thomas (1984) formalized this relation in the Marginal Per Capita Return (MPCR) and demonstrated its influence on the provision of linear public goods. This paper develops a parallel concept, in the context of a threshold public goo...

This paper studies the problem of providing multiple public goods for agents with single-peaked preferences. A decision rule selects m points for the m identical public goods for every pro le of reported preferences. In Miyagawa (1998c) these multiple public goods are options, i.e., alternatives are compared by the most preferred goods according to the agents' preferences. In this paper agents ...

Public provision of a private goods is justified on efficiency grounds in a modelwith no redistributive preferences. A government’s involvement in the provision of a private good generates information about preferences that facilitatesmore efficient revenue extraction for the provision of public goods. Public provision of the private good improves economic efficiency under a condition that is a...

Cooperation in biological, social, and economic groups is underpinned by public goods that are generated by group members at some personal cost. Theory predicts that public goods will be exploited by cheaters who benefit from the goods by not paying for them, thereby leading to the collapse of cooperation. This situation, described as the "public goods dilemma" in game theory, makes the ubiquit...