The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

We propose a new approach to the normative analysis of public-good provision in an economy that is large so that any one individual is too insignificant to have a noticeable effect on the provision levels of public goods. In such an economy, the standard mechanism design problem of calibrating...