Voting and Lottery Drafts as Efficient Public Goods Mechanisms

Voting and Efficient Public Go Od Mechanisms

Two neighbors are considering buying a street light. It costs $100 to install. Alice values the light at $70. Bart values it at $60. If they rely solely on the marketplace to make this decision and do not act together, neither will buy the lamp. However, it is clear that both would be better off if they acted together to make the purchase and split the cost. This street light is a public good—a...

Voting, Punishment, and Public Goods

Researchers have found that voting can help increase voluntary contributions to a public good—provided enforcement through a third party. Not all collective agreements, however, guarantee third-party enforcement. We design an experiment to explore whether a voting rule with and without endogenous punishment increases contributions to a public good. Our results suggest that voting by itself does...

Efficient Mechanisms for Multiple Public Goods∗

We propose two sequential mechanisms for efficient production of public goods. Our analysis differs from the existing literature in allowing for the presence of multiple public goods and in also being “simple.” While both mechanisms ensure efficiency, the payoffs in the first mechanism are asymmetric, being sensitive to the order in which agents move. The second mechanism corrects for this thro...

Voting for Public Goods with

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.