Using Tontines to Finance Public Goods: Experimental Evidence
| dc.contributor.advisor | List, John A | en_US |
| dc.contributor.author | Price, Shannon | en_US |
| dc.contributor.department | Agricultural and Resource Economics | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2004-05-31T20:18:18Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2004-05-31T20:18:18Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2004-04-20 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Relying upon voluntary contributions for public goods provision generally results in the under-provision of the good relative to first-best levels due to the free-rider problem. Taxation/allocation schemes have been designed which solve the free-rider problem, but are too complex to implement. Lotteries and auctions are frequently used to fund public goods, as they diminish the incentive to free-ride. This thesis examines the use of a tontine to finance public goods. I will demonstrate that the tontine, a life-contingent annuity with survivorship benefits, maintains many of the properties of the single fixed-prize lottery. Additionally, I propose that the tontine outperforms the single fixed-prize lottery with symmetric, risk averse agents via some analogue of the Rothschild/Stiglitz effect. Laboratory experiments lend support to both of these conjectures. The results suggest that the tontine can be a more effective mechanism than the single fixed-prize lottery for increasing public goods provisions above voluntary levels. | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 446286 bytes | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1903/234 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | Digital Repository at the University of Maryland | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) | en_US |
| dc.subject.pqcontrolled | Economics, General | en_US |
| dc.title | Using Tontines to Finance Public Goods: Experimental Evidence | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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