Utilitarian Mechanism Design for an Excludable Public Good

Martin Hellwig

No 2009_12, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: This paper studies the design of optimal utilitarian mechanisms for an excludable public good. Excludability provides a basis for making people pay for admissions; the payments can be used for redistribution and/or funding. Whereas previous work assumed that admissions are governed by the payment or nonpayment of a price, this paper allows for arbitrary admission rules. With sufficient inequality aversion, nondegenerate randomization in admissions is shown to be desirable for certain model specifications, with and without participation constraints. The paper also gives a sufficient condition on the distribution of preferences under which randomization is undesirable.

Keywords: Utilitarian welfare maximization; Admission rules for excludable public goods; Randomization in optimal mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D63 H21 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2009_12online.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Utilitarian mechanism design for an excludable public good (2010)
Journal Article: Utilitarian mechanism design for an excludable public good (2010)
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:mpg:wpaper:2009_12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marc Martin ().