EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Public goods, participation constraints, and democracy: A possibility theorem

Yukio Koriyama and Peter Gruner

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: It is well known that ex post efficient mechanisms for the provision of indivisible public goods are not interim individually rational. However, the corresponding literature assumes that agents who veto a mechanism can enforce a situation in which the public good is never provided. This paper instead considers majority voting with uniform cost-sharing as the relevant status quo. Efficient mechanisms may then exist, which also satisfy all agents' interim participation constraints. In this case, ex post inefficient voting mechanisms can be replaced by efficient ones without reducing any individual's expected utility. Intuitively, agents with a low willingness to pay have to contribute more under majority rule than under an efficient mechanism with a balanced budget. Although this possibility theorem is not universal in the sense of Schweizer (), an asymptotic possibility is obtained for certain type distributions.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Game and Economic Behavior, 2012, 75 (issue 1), pp.1-448

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Public goods, participation constraints, and democracy: A possibility theorem (2012) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00689774

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00689774