Group efforts when performance is determined by the “best shot”

Stefano Barbieri () and David Malueg ()

Economic Theory, 2014, vol. 56, issue 2, 333-373

Abstract: We investigate the private provision of a public good whose level is determined by the maximum effort made by a group member. Costs of effort are either commonly known or privately known. For symmetric perfect-information games, any number of players may be active and we characterize the unique (mixed-strategy) equilibrium in which active contributors use the same strategy. Increasing the number of active players leads to stochastically lower individual efforts and level of the public good. When information is private, the symmetric equilibrium is in pure strategies. Increasing the number of players yields a pointwise reduction in the equilibrium contribution strategy but an increase in equilibrium payoffs. Comparative statics with respect to costs and levels of risk aversion are derived. Finally, whether information is public or private, equilibria are inefficient—we provide mechanisms that improve efficiency. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Best-shot public good; Privately provided public good; Volunteer’s dilemma; D61; D82; H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00199-013-0787-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:joecth:v:56:y:2014:i:2:p:333-373

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-013-0787-6

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().