The impact of burden sharing rules on the voluntary provision of public goods

Martin Kesternich, Andreas Lange and Bodo Sturm

No 12-033, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We investigate how burden sharing rules may impact the voluntary provision of a public good which generates heterogeneous benefits to agents. We compare different rule-based contribution schemes that are based on the principle of the smallest common denominator: all agents can suggest a minimum provision level of the public good that is allocated across agents according to some predetermined rule. We find that rule-based contribution schemes significantly increase payoff levels relative to the VCM. Important differences exist between the rules. Contrary to theory predictions, the equal-payoff rule Pareto-dominates all other rules. This also holds relative to a scheme where different types of players separately can determine their minimum contribution levels. Our results lend insights into the efficient institutional design for voluntary private provision of public goods, and how burden sharing rules interact with efficiency when agents are heterogeneous.

Keywords: public goods; institutions; minimum contribution rules; cooperation; heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-gth and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/58255/1/716916827.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of burden sharing rules on the voluntary provision of public goods (2014)
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:zbw:zewdip:12033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().