Essays in public economics

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first, we address the coordination problem that individuals face when deciding whether to pay a membership fee and join an association that provides a pure public good as well as selective benefits to its members, when the ability of the association to fulfill its purposes depends on the membership size. We formulate this problem as a global game and show a unique equilibrium where a positive measure of people joins. Uniqueness also obtains when agents are heterogeneous with respect to the utility they derive from membership. We show that a mean preserving spread in the distribution of valuations for membership decreases the membership size. We further analyze a two-period setting where seniority entails additional benefits. We provide conditions for uniqueness, and show that seniority benefits increase the size of the group in both periods. Our results are consistent with several empirical observations regarding membership in large citizen associations. In the second essay, we study the problem of dynamic provision of a public good by privately informed players who receive additional information over time. We show that, in addition to transmitting information, early contributions alleviate a commitment problem. We characterize equilibria that improve upon static provision, even controlling for information transmission. We demonstrate how heterogeneity in players\u27 valuations can generate an endogenous ordering of contributors, where the party that has more to gain from the public good waits, and the other contributes first. In the third essay, we analyze a problem of dynamic private provision of a public good with private information, when players can exchange payoff irrelevant messages before contributing. We determine conditions under which players completely reveal the information, and an efficient outcome is possible. We show conditions under which no transmission of information is possible, and no-contribution is the only possible outcome. We show how early contributions can allow a more informative outcome of the message game, and enable players to obtain a better outcome, and we demonstrate that it is never efficient to induce the completely revealing equilibrium through early contributions