When Should the Government Own the Physical Assets Needed to Provide Public Goods?

Patrick Schmitz

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Consider a government and a non-governmental organization (NGO) who can collaborate to provide a public good using physical assets. Who should be the owner of the assets if the NGO can make non-contractible investments? In the literature it has been argued that whoever has a larger valuation of the public good should be the owner. Yet, this result was derived under the assumption of symmetric information. We study the case in which the NGO gets privately informed about the quality of the public good. It turns out that public ownership becomes more attractive if the probability of a high quality is relatively small, whereas ownership by the NGO becomes more attractive otherwise.

Keywords: public goods; property rights; investment incentives; asset ownership; incomplete contracts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D23 D86 H41 L31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/121333/1/MPRA_paper_121333.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: When should the government own the physical assets needed to provide public goods? (2024)
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:pra:mprapa:121333

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().