Private provision of public goods in the local interaction model

Abstract

This paper analyses the evolutionary version of the Public Good game (Eshel, Samuelson, and Shaked (1998)) when agents can use imitation and best reply decision rules. I provide a condition, which completely describes agent behavior in the long run, for any number of neighbors and any total number of agents. Moreover, it is shown that it is enough to have just one decision rule per agent in order to obtain the same long run outcomes. The paper gives an explanation why we might observe irrational cooperation in the rational World