Matching as a Cure for Underprovision of Voluntary Public Good Supply: Analysis and an Example

Abstract

Matching mechanisms are regarded as an important instrument to bring about Pareto optimal allocations in a public good economy and to cure the underprovision problem associated with private provision of public goods. The desired Pareto optimal interior match-ing equilibrium, however, emerges only under very special conditions. But we show in this note that corner solutions, in which some agents choose zero flat contributions, normally avoid underprovision and illustrate and interpret our results by a simple numerical example.