The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online

This article surveys the literature on the model of voluntary contributions to public goods that has developed since the early 1980s. This literature draws explicitly on noncooperative game theory. We present a recent novel statement of the problem, based on ‘replacement functions’, which is both more powerful and more transparent than the traditional formulation that uses players' best response functions. We survey existence, uniqueness and comparative static properties of the basic model, and also sketch some of the extensions of that model – impure public goods, weakest link and best shot – that have been proposed and applied to such problems as global public goods and the global commons. We also draw attention to recent attempts to dynamize the model.