We model club formation as a non-cooperative game of coalition formation and surplus division. We show how social norms and individual rationality sustain a particular form of collective inefficiency, namely excessive entry in the joint production and exploitation of an excludable good. We term...

There is a tension between libertarians’ optimism about private supply of public goods and skepticism of the viability of voluntary collusion (Cowen 1992, Cowen and Sutter 1999). Playing off this asymmetry, Cowen (1992) advances the novel argument that the “free market in defense services”...

A model of interaction between hardware vendors, Intel and AMD, and developers of Windows and Linux operating systems is suggested. Intel and AMD both maximize profits forming a traditional oligopoly, while Microsoft and the community of Linux developers form a mixed duopoly, in which only the...

We consider a sequential game in which one player produces a public good and the other player can influence this decision by making an unconditional transfer. An efficient allocation requires the Lindahl property: the sum of the two (implicit) individual prices has to be equal to the resource...

Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit-seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the...

NOTE: The following is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract. We study whether compulsory public provision or voluntary private provision of public goods can survive when individuals who "vote with their feet" can choose between communities that differ in the way that public...

We study whether "coercive" public provision or voluntary private provision of public goods can survive when individuals who "vote with their feet" can choose between communities that differ in the way that public goods are provided. We obtain the following findings: (i) an equilibrium always...

This paper considers the problem of private provision of intertemporal public goods with stock effects and shows how the deposit based solution proposed in Gerber and Wichardt (2009) can be modified to apply to this case

In this paper we characterize the subgame perfect Nash equilibria of a location-then-price game where firms first choose locations and after that compete for prices in two subsequent periods. Locations are thus seen as long term commitments. There are two types of consumers, each with different...