Taxpayers, Suckers and Free Riders

Anthony de Jasay

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 1993, vol. 5, issue 1, 117-125

Abstract: In the traditional theory, resources for providing public goods will not be contributed voluntarily. The state's role is to exert mutually agreed coercion and organize Pareto-superior exchanges of public goods against taxes. `Government failures' spoil the attractions of this solution. In a more general theory, `excludability' is replaced by exclusion cost, and `joint supply' by access not subject to price or non-price allocation. The probability that one's benefit is contingent on one's contribution becomes a significant variable. Rational non- altruists will not generally have a dominant strategy of non-contribution. They may choose the `sucker' or the `free rider' strategy, depending on their assessment of the risk of having no or too few public goods.

Keywords: benefit contingent on contribution; continuous and discrete public goods; exclusion cost; free rider; joint supply; non-excluded public; sucker (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951692893005001006 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:5:y:1993:i:1:p:117-125

DOI: 10.1177/0951692893005001006

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().