provision of a public good ‘crowds out’ private contributions. 1.

The private provision of public goods represents an important issue within discussions of economic decisions. Historically, economists believed that private agents could not succeed in privately supplying public goods at an efficient level due to incentives for free-riding. New theories

ABSTRACT Theoretically, more ethnic heterogeneity may lead to higher aggregate provision of privately provided public goods if ethnic heterogeneity increases the uncertainty about the aggregate level of public good provision. Empirical results in this article, which are based on household survey

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One of the mechanisms that is implemented in the cost containment wave in the health care sectors in western countries is the definition, by the third-party payer, of a set of preferred providers. The insured patients have different access rules to such providers when ill. The rules specify the co-payments and the indemnity the patient obtains if patronizing an out-of-plan care provider. We propose to study the competitive process among providers in terms of both prices and qualities. Competition is influenced among other factors by the status of providers as in-plan or out-of-plan care providers. Also, we face a moral hazard of provider choice related to the trade-off between freedom to choose and the need to hold down costs. Our main findings are that we can define a reimbursement scheme when decisions on prices and qualities are taken simultaneously (that we relate to primary health care sectors) such that the first-best allocation is achieved. In contrast, some type of regulation is needed to achieve the optimal solution when decisions are sequential (specialized health care sector). We also derive some normative conclusions on the way price controls should be implemented in some European Union Member States.

Copyright c©2004 by the authors.

Open source software (OSS) is a public good. A self-interested individual would consider providing such software, if the benefits he gained from having it justified the cost of programming. Nevertheless each agent is tempted to free ride and wait for others to develop the software instead. This problem is modelled as a war of attrition with complete information, job signaling, repeated contribution to the public good and uncertainty in programming. The resulting game does not feature any delay: software will be provided swiftly, by young, low-cost individuals who gain considerably by signaling their programming skills; the startup (and collapse) of an OSS project displays bandwagon dynamics.

Estimating private provision of public goods with heterogenous participants: a structural analysis

The purpose of this paper is to show that the necessary and sufficient conditions of the local stability for Nash equilibrium in the private provi-sion of public goods. Based on our proposition for the stability, we show the effectiveness of the concept of partial stability of the Nash equilib

Abstract. This paper surveys a selection of the literature on the private provision of public goods using the Kolm triangle. (The Kolm triangle is the analogue of an Edgeworth box in an economy with a public good.) We provide simple geometrical proofs of various established results using