On the private provision of two or more public goods

Abstract

We extend the simple model of voluntary public good provision to allow for two or more public goods, and explore the new possibilities that arise in this setting. We show that, when there are many public goods, voluntary contribution equilibrium typically generates, not only too low a level of public good provision, but also the wrong mix of public goods. We also analyze the neutrality property in the more general setting, and extend a neutrality proposition of Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian (1986).