Voluntary participation in a negotiation on providing public goods and renegotiation opportunities ☆

We examine the problem of voluntary participation in negotiations regarding the provision of public goods. In contrast to earlier studies, in our model, a negotiation is followed by renegotiations. First, players decide whether to participate in a negotiation, and the participants produce a public good. The participants then renegotiate the level of the public good with nonparticipants in the preceding negotiations. We show that with these renegotiation opportunities, many players may participate in providing the public good in the preceding negotiation. In some cases, all players participate in the preceding negotiation and the public good is produced efficiently. Our findings indicate that more players participate in the provision of public goods if they have strong bargaining power in the renegotiations. Hence, this problem may not be as severe as reported by previous studies. Our results may be consistent with the recent developments in voluntary projects for international river management.