The MDP Procedure for public goods and local strategy proofness

Strategy-Proofness of Scoring Allocation Correspondences for Indivisible Goods

We study resource allocation in a model due to Brams and King [2005] and further developed by Baumeister et al. [2014]. Resource allocation deals with the distribution of resources to agents. We assume resources to be indivisible, nonshareable, and of single-unit type. Agents have ordinal preferences over single resources. Using scoring vectors, every ordinal preference induces a utility functi...

Local Public Goods and Clubs1

Strategy-proof Voting for Multiple Public Goods

In a voting model where the set of feasible alternatives is a subset of a product set A = A1 × ·· · × Am of m finite categories, we characterize the set of all strategy-proof social choice functions for three different types of preference domains over A, namely for the domains of additive, completely separable, and weakly separable preferences over A.

Local public goods and the demand for high-income municipalities

Affluent towns often deliver high-quality public services to their residents. I estimate the willingness to pay to live in a high-income suburb, above and beyond the demand of wealthy neighbors, by measuring changes in housing prices across city–suburban borders as the income disparity between the two municipalities changes over time. I find that a $10,000 increase in town-level median income i...

Strategy-proofness in the Large∗

We propose a criterion of approximate incentive compatibility, strategy-proofness in the large (SP-L), and argue that it is a useful second-best to exact strategyproofness (SP) for market design. Conceptually, SP-L requires that an agent who regards a mechanism’s “prices” as exogenous to her report – be they traditional prices as in an auction mechanism, or price-like statistics in an assignmen...