Who will do a job that nobody wants but that someone has to do? The search for a volunteer is modelled as a war of attrition in which everyone is tempted to just wait for someone else to do it. We show that the volunteer will be, ceteris paribus, the individual for whom the benefit/cost ratio of performing the public service is the largest, the one most impatient to consume it, or the one who stands to benefit from it the longest.
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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Public Economics with number
9405001.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making H - Public Economics
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