| Summary: | <p>This thesis consists of three papers relevant to the private provision of public goods.</p>
<p>The first considers how providing one public good (technological development) can realize another (existential safety: roughly, avoidance of a catastrophe that kills everyone). Technology may directly increase existential risk, but, by enriching society and increasing a planner's willingness to pay for safety, indirectly reduce existential risk. The second effect is found to outweigh the first surprisingly often.</p>
<p>The second paper studies a game in which funders with different discount rates provide a public good over time. Impatient funders should often crowd patient funders out of contributing in the short term, with the latter investing all their resources for future spending. Existing and proposed laws preventing the patient from doing this are almost as costly to them as full expropriation, if they are small.</p>
<p>The third extends a static public good game to a general equilibrium setting in which prices depend on expenditures. Accounting for this endogeneity motivates spending behavior markedly different both from equilibrium behavior in classic or partial equilibrium public good models, and from that in the Walrasian setting of general equilibrium with only private goods. Equilibrium is compatible with satiation and with philanthropically-motivated spending on public bads.</p>
<p>All three are theory papers, but little else unites them methodologically. Their common thread is a motivation: to improve how classical utilitarians spend their resources, given the complex relationships spending in one time and place can have to other markets or other times. They are thus lighter on policy prescriptions and welfare analyses than research on public good games often is. Their primary intended audience is not a planner seeking the efficient frontier, but a philanthropist acting on particular preferences in a partially non-cooperative setting.</p>
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