6 Conclusion
The private provision of a discrete public good is likely to end up in a war of attrition:
individuals prefer to wait until someone else volunteers and provides the public good.
But they may not be able to wait for an infinite amount of time. This can be due
to time constraints or to a finite time horizon imposed by a third party. In many
applications, such as allocating tasks in firms or communities, time limits are a
typical feature of the volunteering game.
In this paper, we analyzed incentives to obtain information ahead of a war of at-
trition. The information that is available to the individuals has an important impact
on the equilibrium outcome of the volunteering game. This suggests that individuals
have an incentive to use information acquisition strategically when they anticipate
the private provision game. We assumed that initially the individuals do not know
exactly their own cost of provision of the public good, but that they can find out
about this cost prior to the volunteering game. Indeed, there can be an incentive for
one individual not to become informed of his cost of provision even if the information
is available without cost. For a sufficiently short time horizon, being uninformed in-
duces an informed individual to volunteer immediately in case he has a low cost of
provision, whereas not knowing the own cost of provision constitutes a commitment
to delay the own concession. For a sufficiently long time horizon, however, finding
out about the own cost is a strictly dominant strategy. Since the time horizon has
a crucial impact on information acquisition as well as on the equilibrium outcome of
the volunteering game, it may be used as an instrument to influence the efficiency of
the public good provision.
Our model assumed that the individuals’ costs of provision follow a two-point
probability distribution. For continuous distribution functions, similar results can
be obtained. The equilibrium properties change in the sense that an individual with
private information about his cost of provision chooses his concession time as an
increasing function of his provision cost. In the case where exactly one individual
has learned his cost, we get a similar result for a small time limit T: the informed
individual volunteers immediately if he has a low cost of provision, which creates
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