In this work, we consider a public facility allocation problem decided through a voting process under the majority rule. A location of the public facility is a majority rule winner if there is no other location in the network where more than half of the voters would have been closer to than the majority rule winner. We develop fast algorithms for interesting cases with nice combinatorial struct...

This paper analyzes public goods whose benefits cross countries’ borders and generations. Once provided, transnational intergenerational public goods (TIPGs) are assets that generate benefits for subsequent generations. For treaties involving TIPGs, a coalition of rich developed countries are apt to shoulder more of the provision burden then a coalition of poor developing countries. This burden...

Researchers have found that voting can help increase voluntary contributions to a public good—provided enforcement through a third party. Not all collective agreements, however, guarantee third-party enforcement. We design an experiment to explore whether a voting rule with and without endogenous punishment increases contributions to a public good. Our results suggest that voting by itself does...

Firms spend considerable amounts on socially responsible business practices. These expenditures are often seen as an indirect form of profit maximization or a perquisite of the manager at shareholder expense. We offer a more direct explanation. Since shareholders enjoy both consumption and private benefits from public goods, managers acting on their behalf will (1) provision more public goods t...

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This paper establishes several propositions concerning the importance of context in valuing public goods. It first provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the value of a public good to be independent of context. Utility-constant valuation sequences are considered where public goods are systematically made available or taken away. For the case of strict Hicksian substitutes, willingness...

Economic agents have the possibility to fund the protection of environmental public goods, such as natural ecosystems and biodiversity, facing unknown risks of collapse, which could help to back them up. On the base of the prediction markets, which meet with a degree of success since their introduction, we propose an evolutionary model of an option fund market for the threshold environmental pu...

We reconsider the well known Becker-Coase (BC ) argument, according to which changes in divorce laws should not affect divorce rates, in the context of households which consume public goods in addition to private goods. For this result to hold, utility must be transferable both within marriage and upon divorce, and the marginal rate of substitution between public and private consumption needs t...

In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the provider of infrastructure are the recognition of the economic and political importance of infrastructure for development, and the faith that government ...