Public Goods Provision with Rent-Extracting Administrators
35 Pages Posted: 16 Feb 2018
There are 2 versions of this paper
Public Goods Provision with Rent-Extracting Administrators
Public Goods Provision with Rent-Extracting Administrators
Date Written: January 11, 2018
Abstract
This paper studies public goods provision in an experiment in which contributors repeatedly interact with rent-extracting administrators. Our main result is that the presence of an administrator reduces contributions but only because rent extraction lowers the MPCR. Analysing the dynamic interactions between the contributors and the administrator, we demonstrate that rent-extraction and cooperation shocks trigger short-run adjustments in the agents’ behaviour. However, shocks do not have permanent effects. This explains the long-run resilience of cooperation to rent extraction. We also show that cooperative attitudes and trust are traits that explain permanent differences in the short-run volatility of public goods provision.
Keywords: cooperation, rent extraction, corruption, trustworthiness, public goods, public trust game, panel vector autoregressive model
JEL Classification: C320, C910, C920, H410
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
