Bargaining Foundation for Ratio Equilibrium in Public Good Economies

We provide a bargaining foundation for the concept of ratio equilibrium in public good economies. We define a bargaining game of alternating offers in which players bargain to determine their cost shares of public good production and a level of public good. We study the stationary subgame perfect equilibrium without delay of the bargaining game. We demonstrate that when the players are perfectly patient, they are indifferent between the equilibrium offers of all players. We also show that every stationary subgame perfect equilibrium without delay in which the ratios offered by all players are the same leads to a ratio equilibrium. In addition, we demonstrate that all equilibrium ratios are offered by the players at some stationary subgame perfect equilibrium without delay. We use these results to discuss the case when the assumption of perfectly patient players is relaxed and the cost of delay vanishes.