Studies in the Private Provision of Public Goods
{'Code': '04050100', 'Directorate': {'Abbreviation': 'SBE', 'LongName': 'Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie'}, 'Division': {'Abbreviation': 'SES', 'LongName': 'Divn Of Social and Economic Sciences'}}
{'SignBlockName': 'Daniel H. Newlon', 'PO_EMAI': None, 'PO_PHON': None}
This project studies the following three problems in the theory of              public goods and public decision making:  1) the problem of inducing            voters in a democracy to vote intelligently when information gathering          is costly; 2) the analytics of rent-seeking by individuals and                  alliances; and 3) the economics of quality and diversity in the                 newspaper and television industry.  The three lines of research share a         common fundamental framework-- a formal model of a Nash equilibrium in          which "public goods" are supplied voluntarily by individuals.  The              public goods in these three problems are respectively informed decision         making by voters, military expenditures or lobbying activities in the           case of rent seeking, and the "quality" of television programming or            newspaper writing.                                                                                                                                              Television signals are a standard example of a public good.  Once a             television signal is produced, any individual can watch the signal              without imposing any costs on others.  Newspaper technology is similar          to that of television in that the amount of skill and effort required           to produce stories of given length and quality is independent of the            number of people who read the paper.  The project determines the                quality and price in the provision of newspapers and television and             oligopolistic markets with and without exclusions and with the                  possibility of support by private advertising.                                                                                                                  Lobbying efforts of a special interest group are treated as                     contributions to the supply of a pure public good which benefits group          members and harms members of competing groups.  This project extends            previous work on the competition of individual agents for rights to a           prize, e.g., disputed land, trade restrictions, etc., to the case of            alliances among groups which are held together non-coercively and whose         interests may coincide only partially.  The results should improve our          understanding of political, economic, and military alliances.                                                                                                   The staple problem in the theory of public choice is the "paradox of            not voting."  If voting is costly, then it has been argued that since           there is negligible probability that one vote affects the outcome in a          large electorate, it is irrational to vote in most elections.   A               possible explanation for the fact that so many people vote is that they         enjoy "psychic benefits" from voting that are sufficiently large to             overcome the cost of visiting the polls.  But even if it is cheap to            vote, it may not be so cheap to vote intelligently.  This project               rigorously studies information acquisition by voters and delineates             plausible circumstances in which the accuracy of an election decreases          with the size of the electorate.  The project analyzes the choice of a          small subset of the electorate to make certain kinds of social                  decisions, or government by jury, as a way of dealing with the problem          of uninformed voting.
{'FirstName': 'Theodore', 'LastName': 'Bergstrom', 'PI_MID_INIT': 'C', 'PI_SUFX_NAME': None, 'PI_FULL_NAME': 'Theodore C Bergstrom', 'EmailAddress': 'tedb@econ.ucsb.edu', 'NSF_ID': '000382978', 'StartDate': '06/01/1988', 'EndDate': None, 'RoleCode': 'Principal Investigator'}
{'Name': 'Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor', 'CityName': 'ANN ARBOR', 'ZipCode': '481091079', 'PhoneNumber': '7347636438', 'StreetAddress': '1109 GEDDES AVE, SUITE 3300', 'StreetAddress2': None, 'CountryName': 'United States', 'StateName': 'Michigan', 'StateCode': 'MI', 'CONGRESSDISTRICT': '06', 'CONGRESS_DISTRICT_ORG': 'MI06', 'ORG_UEI_NUM': 'GNJ7BBP73WE9', 'ORG_LGL_BUS_NAME': 'REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN', 'ORG_PRNT_UEI_NUM': None}
{'Name': None, 'CityName': None, 'StateCode': None, 'ZipCode': None, 'StreetAddress': None, 'CountryCode': None, 'CountryName': None, 'StateName': None, 'CountryFlag': None, 'CONGRESSDISTRICT': None, 'CONGRESS_DISTRICT_PERF': '""'}
{'Code': '1320', 'Text': 'Economics'}
{'url': 'https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/download?DownloadFileName=1988&All=true', 'xml': '8800114.xml'}