Public-Good Provision, Mechanism Design and Voting

Mechanism Design and Voting for Public-Good Provision

We propose a new approach to the normative analysis of public-good provision. In addition to individual incentive compatibility, we impose conditions of robust implementability and coalition proofness. Under these additional conditions, participants’ contributions can only depend on the level of public-good provision. For a public good that comes as a single indivisible unit, provision can only...

Ex Interim Voting in Public Good Provision

Repeated Public Good Provision

We provide a tractable framework for studying the e¤ects of group size and structure on the maximum level of a public good that can be provided in sequential equilibrium in repeated games with private monitoring. We restrict attention to games with "all-or-nothing" monitoring, in which in every period player i either perfectly observes player j’s contribution to the public good or gets no infor...

Democratic public good provision

This paper analyzes an overlapping generation model of public good provision under repeated voting. The public good is financed through age-dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment. Taxes redistribute income both across different skill groups and across generations. We contrast the political equilibria with the Ramsey allocation, and analyze the sources of inefficiency. The pol...

Public-Good Productivity Differentials and Non-Cooperative Public-Good Provision

We explore the generality of Konrad and Lommerud (1995)’s Rotten Spouse Theorem. While the result holds for an arbitrary number of agents, it fails to hold for general technologies. We discuss some of the implications for CO2-emissions models.