Street as a Stage: A Model of Dynamic Provision of Public Goods under the Threat of Protest
Wen-Kai Wang, Kannika Thampanishvong

Abstract
It has become increasingly common that the politically and economically weak citizens use protest as a channel through which they express their dissatisfaction with the policies engendered by the elites. This paper aims to provide a better understanding on this issue by using differential games to study whether protest could trigger some changes in public good investment under uncertainty. In this paper, we show that protest on its own is not sufficient for inducing the elites to invest more in public goods. Instead, the elites -- the group with political power -- choose policy to increase their income and to directly transfer resources from the rest of the society to themselves.

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