How to safeguard world heritage sites? A theoretical model of “cultural responsibility”

We outline a model in which preservation of UNESCO heritage sites is analyzed as a classical global public good problem where the decentralized Nash equilibrium yields suboptimal contribution vis-à-vis the Social Planner equilibrium. The absence of a Global Social Planner and the need of coordination across different countries for the implementation of the second solution make the Social Planner equilibrium hardly attainable. The same problem arises when trying to enforce symmetric or asymmetric tax deductions in different countries. We analyze the contribution that cultural corporate responsibility can give to the solution of the problem discussing its limits and potential vis-à-vis the other two alternatives. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.