Summary of Doctoral Dissertation: “Voluntary Participation Games in Public Good Mechanisms: Coalitional Deviations and Efficiency”

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine a participation problem in a mechanism to produce a (pure) public good. The public good is one which satisfies non-excludability and non-rivalry: all agents can consume the same amount of a public good regardless of their contribution to it. Therefore, every agent has an incentive to free-ride the public good that is produced by other agents. As a result, the public good is provided at a low level. This problem is known as the “free-rider” problem. A solution to the free-rider problem is the construction of economic mechanisms or systems in which the socially efficient level of public goods is provided as a result of strategic behavior of agents. The construction of such mechanisms has been studied in two distinct directions: one is strategy-proofness, and the other is Nash implementation. In the theory of strategy-poofness, the mechanism designer, for example, the policyimplementation organization or the supplier of public goods, constructs a mechanism to elicit information about agents’ preferences; this information is necessary for the provision of an efficient level of public goods as well as efficient cost distribution. However, preferences are usually privately known. Therefore, it is possible that selfish agents will try to misrepresent their preferences in order to manipulate the provision of the public good and their cost burdens. As a result of such strategic misrepresentation, the level of the public good may be socially inefficient. Thus, the construction of procedures that