Full agreement and the provision of threshold public goods

Federica Alberti and Edward Cartwright

Public Choice, 2016, vol. 166, issue 1, No 11, 205-233

Abstract: Abstract The experimental evidence suggests that groups are inefficient at providing threshold public goods. This inefficiency appears to reflect an inability to coordinate over how to distribute the cost of providing the good. So, why do groups not just split the cost equally? We offer an answer to this question by demonstrating that in a standard threshold public good game there is no collectively rational recommendation. We also demonstrate that if full agreement is required in order to provide the public good then there is a collectively rational recommendation, namely, to split the cost equally. Requiring full agreement may, therefore, increase efficiency in providing threshold public goods. We test this hypothesis experimentally and find support for it.

Keywords: Public good; Threshold; Full agreement; Focal point; Experiment; Coordination; C72; H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-016-0321-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Full agreement and the provision of threshold public goods (2012)
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:kap:pubcho:v:166:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s11127-016-0321-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-016-0321-z

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().