Kantian Imperatives in Public Goods Networks

We study a behaviorally heterogeneous society where public goods provision and access are local and selfish agents co-habit with Kantian counterparts. Contrary to standard public goods games over complete networks, Kantian imperatives are not necessarily beneficial when the underlying graph becomes relevant and societies with Kantian imperatives can suffer from both over and under-provision of public goods. When equilibrium Kantian contribution exceeds the highest contributing selfish agent, contribution-maximization requires Kantians to band together and is related to the solution of the Minimum-$k$-Union Problem. Otherwise, there exist graphs wherein Kantians should be far apart. Welfare-maximizing distributions of imperatives are also contribution-maximizing when Kantian and selfish contributions are close enough. Otherwise, contribution-maximizing architectures are not necessarily welfare-maximizing