We examine incentive-compatible mechanisms for fair financing and efficient selection of a public budget (or public good). A mechanism selects the level of the public budget and imposes taxes on individuals. Individuals’ preferences are quasilinear. Fairness is expressed as weak monotonicity (called scale monotonicity) of the tax imposed on an individual as a function of his benefit from an inc...

Effective provision of public goods is a key element of quality of life. While poverty is frequently measured and conceived in terms of private consumption, this is too narrow a view. Two groups of people with similar private consumption will have very different qualities of life if there are significant differences in their access to safe drinking water or medical care. Mechanisms for effectiv...

We study three different models in which public goods are supplied by private contributions. In one of these models, tax-financed government subsidies to private contributions will definitely increase the equilibrium supply of public goods. In the other two models, government subsidies are neutralized by offsetting changes in private contributions. We explain why it is that these models lead to...

Health improvement requires collective as well as individual action, and the health of poor populations in particular requires collective action between countries as well as within them. Initiatives such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria reflect a growing awareness of this fact. However, initiating, organizing and financing collective actions for health at the global le...