This study considers the twin problems of free riding and coordination failure, which are prevalent in provision multiple public goods with diminishing marginal returns. Specifically, we consider a game two goods, each has an upper bound effective contribution. Any costly contributions beyond wasted. In this game, payoff-sum maximizing Pareto-optimal outcome requires sum by group members to be ...

Cancer cells produce growth factors that diffuse and sustain tumour proliferation, a form of cooperation that can be studied using mathematical models of public goods in the framework of evolutionary game theory. Cell populations, however, form heterogeneous networks that cannot be described by regular lattices or scale-free networks, the types of graphs generally used in the study of cooperati...

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine a participation problem in a mechanism to produce a (pure) public good. The public good is one which satisfies non-excludability and non-rivalry: all agents can consume the same amount of a public good regardless of their contribution to it. Therefore, every agent has an incentive to free-ride the public good that is produced by other agents. As a ...

The fair division of indivisible goods has long been an important topic in economics and, more recently, computer science. We investigate the existence of envyfree allocations of indivisible goods, that is, allocations where each player values her own allocated set of goods at least as highly as any other player’s allocated set of goods. Under additive valuations, we show that even when the num...