146 – The political economy of the vote with the wallet

Abstract

The willingness to pay of private consumers for socially and environmentally re- sponsible companies retailing public goods is an emerging though under-researched contemporary economic feature.

We model the problem faced by responsible con- sumers as a typical multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma and analyse four redistribution mechanisms that can be implemented by regulators and institutions to enforce the cooperative equilibrium.

The desirable property of three of these schemes is that of extending the parametric interval of cooperative equilibrium without additional government expenditure. We also discuss the implication of our results for already implemented policies such as feed-in tariffs (FITs).

Keywords: Redistribution mechanism, Corporate social responsibility, Multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma.

JEL Classification: C72(NoncooperativeGames), D71(Socialchoice), M14(So- cial Responsibility).