A comment on ‘the anti-paradox of cooperation: diversity may pay!’

ABSTRACT

A recent study analytically investigates the stability of a public good coalition assuming unlimited types of players that differ in benefits and costs of providing public goods. They show that, if there is a positive covariance between benefit and cost parameters of coalition members, the size of a stable coalition cannot be larger than three. This comment further proves that if the above assumption is made to all players, coalition members always have high abatement benefits and costs.

KEYWORDS:

• International environmental agreements
• coalition formation
• heterogeneity
• public goods

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C72
• D70
• H41

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Toshiyuki Fujita and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions that have helped to improve this paper substantially.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ At least one inequality being strict.