Nature of human capital, technology and ownership of public goods

Besley and Ghatak (2001) show that a public good should be owned by the agent who values the public good the most - irrespective of technological factors. In this paper we relax their assumptions in a natural way by allowing the agents to be indispensable, and we show that the relative valuations are not the sole determinant of an optimal ownership structure but also the nature of human capital and technology matter. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.