When should the government own the physical assets needed to provide public goods?
研究了政府与非政府组织合作提供公共产品时，在非政府组织拥有私人信息的情况下，实物资产所有权应如何分配，发现高质量概率低时公有更优，反之私有更优。
Consider a government and a non-governmental organization (NGO) who can collaborate to provide a public good using physical assets. Who should be the owner of the assets if the NGO can make non-contractible investments? In the literature it has been argued that whoever has a larger valuation of the public good should be the owner. Yet, this result was derived under the assumption of symmetric information. We study the case in which the NGO gets privately informed about the quality of the public good. It turns out that public ownership becomes more attractive if the probability of a high quality is relatively small, whereas ownership by the NGO becomes more attractive otherwise. • The government and an NGO both care about a public project. • The NGO can make non-contractible investments. • The NGO becomes privately informed about the quality of the project. • A relatively large probability of high quality favors private ownership. • A relatively small probability of high quality favors public ownership.