Should the Government Provide Public Goods if it Cannot Commit?
Francisco Silva
No 477, Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Abstract:
I compare two different systems of provision of discrete public goods: a centralized system, ruled by a benevolent dictator who has limited commitment power; and an anarchic system, based on voluntary contributions, where there is no ruler. If the public good is binary, then the public good provision problem is merely an informational one. In this environment, I show that any allocation which is implementable in a centralized system and is ex-post individually rational, is also implementable in anarchy. However, as the number of alternatives available increases, the classical free riding problem described in Samuelson (1954) emerges, and eventually the centralized system becomes the preferred one.
JEL-codes: D82 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economia.uc.cl/docs/doctra/dt-477.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Should the government provide public goods if it cannot commit? (2020)
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:ioe:doctra:477
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jaime Casassus ().