On the game-theoretic structure of public-good economies

The paper characterizes the class of transferable-utility cooperative games arising from public-good economies. In the symmetric case and in the three-player case, this class is precisely that of convex games. In general, a highly structured pattern of differences between the worths of the various coalitions is characteristic of the public-good games. This pattern implies convexity but also many other restrictions. Some of these restrictions express in a formal way the intuition that full cooperation is the only stable form of collective behaviour in public-good economies.