The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model

IE:;, r: ~;-, {fSinceits arrival on the public finance scene some 50 years ago, the Tiebout ~!inodel has played a strikingly diverse range of roles. Indeed, it appears, in ~important ways, to mean different things to different people. The mod~l has ~peen employed as everything from an algorithm for the resolution of the basic Jpreference-revelation problem in the theory of public goods to a descriptive itreory of local public finance. There are thus severaf quite different literatures r~hat draw on Tiebout's seminal contribution in fundamental ways. My pur~ose in this chapter is to layout this range of applications and to explore each ~f them in turn. This provides an opportunity both to assess the contributions tof the model and to offer some reflections on the literature itself. I begin with ~.bme thoughts on Tiebout's own view of his paper. From there, however, the