Voluntary public good provision with private information using order statistics

Abstract

We study the voluntary provision of a public good with private information when inputs are not perfectly substitutable. Modeling the production function as a mixture of order statistics of individual efforts, we bridge the extreme best-shot and weakest-link technologies, passing through summation, in a tractable framework. In contrast with existing predictions, increasing complementarity results in increased public good provision, if the marginal cost of effort rises sufficiently fast.