Equilibrium Contributions and “Locally Enjoyed” Public Goods

The main results of the traditional theory of private provision of public goods in the case of identical individuals are: 1) there exists a unique Nash equilibrium pattern of contributions in which everybody contributes the same amount (Bergstrom et al. [1986]); 2) this pattern is locally stable (Cornes [1980]). Under homothetic preferences, I show that these results generally no longer hold in the context of “locally enjoyed” public goods. In particular, when the symmetric Nash equilibrium is not the unique equilibrium pattern, it is locally unstable and there exists at least a locally stable asymmetric Nash equilibrium.