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Interactions between Kantian and Non-Kantian agents in games of contributions to public goods

Research School of Economics

Event details

Seminar

Date & time

Thursday 17 August 2017
3.40pm–3.40pm

Venue

Fred Gruen Economics Seminar Room, H W Arndt Building 25A, ANU

Speaker

Ngo Van Long, McGill University.

Contacts

General Series Coordinator

About the speaker

Ngo Van Long, McGill University.

We study a theoretical model of voluntary contributions to public goods, in which there are two types of agents: Kantians and Non-Kantians. We propose the concept of Kant-Nash equilibrium and investigate the properties of the equilibrium, such as existence, uniqueness, and fair sharing of burden. It is found that a Kant-Nash equilibrium in pure strategies is Pareto efficient for the Kantians: it is as if they cooperated to maximize a weighted sum of their payoffs. If mixed strategies are permitted, Kantian agents may find it optimal not to coordinate on the Pareto efficient pure strategy. When the Kantian share of the population increases, the size of the public good may increase more than proportionately. In a final section, we discuss several extensions of the model to take account of dynamics and of the existence of semi-Kantian agents and conditional Kantians.

Afternoon tea available.

The Research School of Economics hosts four active seminar series in Applied Microeconomics, Economic Theory, Macroeconomics as well as a General series. Speakers include international and locally well-known economists.

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