How Many Members of the Creative Class Should a City Seek to Attract?

Abstract

In this note, we focus on the decision problem faced by a city authority (CA) who seeks to attract members of the creative class to her city by providing a local public good (LPG). We construct a stylized model of this interaction and shed light on three questions. First, we determine the optimal number of creative class members to attract when the CA maximizes the utility of each member who chooses to reside in the city. Second, assuming the CA provides the LPG optimally given the total number of resident members, we compute the loss borne by this CA from having a suboptimal number of members living in the city. Finally, we ascertain what number of members living in the city maximizes the total utility obtained by the CA and then compare this answer with our answer to the first question stated above.