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...

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...

We study the provision of public goods when all agents have complete information and can write binding agreements. This framework is in deliberate contrast to a traditional view of the free-rider problem based on hidden information or voluntary provision. We focus on coalition formation as a potential source of inefficiency. To this end, we develop a notion of an equilibrium coalition structure...