# An Analysis of the Supply of Open Government Data
## 2 Literature Review
### Determinants of the Supply of Open Government Data  
In this section, we develop an analysis of the determinants of the supply of open government data. Hence, we explain the incentives of government policy makers to provide goods and services. As we mentioned before, in this paper, we consider open government data as a pure public good which has two important properties: it is a non-excludable (once a pure public good is provided, then any person who seeks to have access can have access to that good) and non-rival good (the consumption of the good by some agent does not preclude the consumption of the same good by everyone else). In our analysis, we consider that households and firms demand open government data because they find value in it; that is to say, households and firms might find open government data valuable because this information might help them to make rational and informed decisions. This information can also be used to foster their objectives, such as engaging in civic activities, political debates, and other activities regarded as desirable. For the case of households and in the case of firms, open government data might help them to make more efficient decisions (see [37; 22; 38]). The literature on public economics has made important contributions to the study of the provision of this type of good, and this literature can be classified in two distinctive lines of research. The first line is the normative theory, and the second is the positive theory of the provision of public goods. The normative literature has emphasized that the preferences of households for private and public goods, the technology of production, and the costs of taxation that finance these goods are the main determinants of the provision of public goods (for a comprehensive review of the normative literature on public goods, see [39] and, more recently, [40]). In contrast, the positive literature on public goods has emphasized that, in addition to household preferences and the technology of production, governments are suppliers of public goods, and candidates to public office are elected through a democratic process. It should be pointed out that the supply of open data has a production cost and, therefore, governments need to allocate public budgets for the collection and administration of data. This means that the allocation of budgets that allow the supply of open government data is subjected to a regular process of political negotiation in Congress and executive powers. Therefore, the provision of public goods could be explained by electoral incentives; political candidates seek to win public office, and they compete for votes in an election to form the government and make decisions over public policy (see [41; 42]). For this reason,politicians have incentives to provide public goods that benefit a significant proportion of voters in the electorate, with the hope of attracting votes in the election and maintaining political support while politicians hold office. To be more specific about how electoral competition creates incentives for politicians to provide different levels of goods and services, we describe in detail the quid pro quo of models of electoral competition (see [41; 42]). In a democracy, voters with different socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and income might demand certain goods and services from the government because they benefit from these goods and services. Hence, candidates might consider that the distribution of demands of voters for goods and services from the government might be characterized by Figure 1. For the purpose of exposition, we assume \(g\) is the size of the provision of the public good.