State-variable public goods and social comparisons

Thomas Aronsson and Olof Johansson-Stenman ()

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2014, vol. 68, issue 2, 390-410

Abstract: The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with others’ current consumption) and catching-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with others’ past consumption) in an economy with two productivity types, overlapping generations, and optimal nonlinear income taxation. The extent to which the conventional rules for provision of state-variable public goods (a dynamic analog of the Samuelson rules) ought to be modified is shown to clearly depend on the strength of the relative concerns of both kinds, but also on the preference elicitation format.

Keywords: State-variable public goods; Asymmetric information; Relative consumption; Status; Positional preferences; Climate policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 H21 H23 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069614000424
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jeeman:v:68:y:2014:i:2:p:390-410

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2014.07.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is currently edited by M.A. Cole, A. Lange, D.J. Phaneuf, D. Popp, M.J. Roberts, M.D. Smith, C. Timmins, Q. Weninger and A.J. Yates

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().