On the private provision of public goods on networks

This paper analyzes the private provision of public goods where consumers interact within a fixed network structure and may benefit only from their direct neighbors' provisions. We present a proof of the existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium for general networks and best-reply functions. In addition, we investigate the neutrality result of Warr [38] and Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian [6] whereby consumers are able to undo the impact of income redistribution as well as public provision financed by lump-sum taxes. To this effect, we show that the neutrality result has a limited scope of application beyond a special network architecture in the neighborhood of the set of contributors.