WEAK LINKS, GOOD SHOTS AND OTHER PUBLICGOOD GAMES: BUILDING ON BBV

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public goodthat avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is in-creased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the aggregatelevel of public good is determined as a more general social composition func-tion of individual gifts –speci…cally, as a generalized CES form –rather thanas an unweighted sum as well as the the weakest-link and best-shot modelssuggested by Hirshleifer. In each case, we characterize the set of equilibria,in some cases establishing existence of a unique equilibrium as well as brie‡ypointing out some interesting comparative static properties...