On the Private Provision of Public Goods

Abstract

We consider a model of the non-cooperative provision of a public good. We show that there will in general exist a unique Nash equilibrium. The equilibrium provision of the public good will be independent of certain kinds of redistributions of wealth among the set of agents who are actually contributing to the public good, but will depend in general on the composition of the contributing set of consumers. We are able to characterize the properties and the comparative statics of the equilibrium in a quite complete way and to analyze the extent to which government provision of public goods "crowds out" private contributions.