Standard economic analysis assumes the sets of public and private goods to be exogenously given. Yet societies very often choose the public-private mix, using resources to convert seemingly private goods into ones with public goods characteristics and vice versa. And, in practice, we see a bewilderingly large variety of public-private mixes across societies. This papers advances an analysis of ...

Centralized sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. However, little is known about how such institutions come into existence. In this paper we investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, the endogenous formation of institutions in a public goods game. Our theo...

This paper considers incentives to provide goods that are non-excludable along social or geographic links. We find, first, that networks can lead to specialization in public good provision. In every social network there is an equilibrium where some individuals contribute and others free-ride. In many networks, this extreme is the only outcome. Second, specialization can benefit society as a who...

In a simple public good economy, we propose a natural bargaining procedure whose equilibria converge to Lindahl allocations as the cost of bargaining vanishes. The procedure splits the decision over the allocation in a decision about personalized prices and a decision about output levels for the public good. Since this procedure does not assume price-taking behavior, it provides a strategic fou...

Procreation is the ultimate public goods problem. Each new child affects the welfare of many other people, and some (but not all) children produce uncompensated value that future people will enjoy. This essay addresses challenges that arise if we think of procreation and parenting as public goods. These include whether individual choices are likely to lead to a socially desirable outcome, and w...

We examine the strategy-proof provision of public goods when agents care not only about the level of provision of a public good, but also the number of consumers. We show that on such domains strategy-proof and eecient social choice functions must be rigid in that they must always assign a xed number of consumers, regardless of individual desires to participate. When congestion eeects dominate ...