Public-Good Provision, Mechanism Design and Voting

Felix J. Bierbrauer () and Martin Hellwig
Additional contact information
Felix J. Bierbrauer: University of Cologne, Chair for Public Economics CMR – Center for Macroeconomic Research

No 2015_11, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on the level of the public good that is provided and that level can only depend on the population shares of people favouring one level over another. For a public good that comes as a single indivisible unit the outcome depends on whether or not the share of votes in favour of provision exceeds a speci ed threshold. With more provision levels for the public good more complicated mechanisms can be used but they still involve the counting of votes rather than any measurement of the participants' willingness to pay. The paper thus provides a foundation for the use of voting mechanisms.

Keywords: Public-good provision; Mechanism Design; Voting Mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 D70 D82 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2015_11online.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:2015_11

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 ().