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Public goods and group size

Crawford School of Public Policy
Photo by Asim Alnamat on Pixnio

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 22 June 2021
2.00pm–3.30pm

Venue

Weston Theatre Level 1, JG Crawford Building #132, 1 Lennox Crossing, ANU

Speaker

Larry Weifeng Liu, Australian National University

This paper examines the effects of group size on private provision of public goods, focusing on the role of public good aggregators through which individual public good contributions are aggregated. We propose a general aggregator that comprises existing aggregators of pure public goods, accommodates rivalrous public goods, and also includes several novel aggregators. Considering a wide range of aggregators we show that the effects of group size on public good provision heavily depend on aggregator structure. We also allow agent heterogeneity in incomes and preferences and demonstrate that the effects of heterogeneity on public good provision differ across aggregators. Methodologically, we employ the aggregative game approach (Cornes and Hartley 2007a, 2007b) to characterise equilibrium, which avoids dimension proliferation when group size increases.

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