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...

The paper studies the impact of government budget constraint in a pure adverse selection problem of monopoly regulation. The government maximizes total surplus but incurs some cost of public funds. An alternative to regulation is proposed in which firms are free to enter the market and to choose...

The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator’s objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as follows: 1) The regulator’s...

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...

In this paper we explore the relationship between an equitable distribution of the cost shares in public-good provision on the one hand and the core property of an allocation on the other. In particular we show that it is an inhomogeneous distribution of cost shares that motivates some coalition...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Usually, groups increase their productivity by the specialization of their group members. In these cases, group output is no longer simply a sum of individual outputs. We analyze contests with group-specific public goods that allow for different degrees of complementarity between group...

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting (Varian, Journal of Public Economics, 1994). Our findings support the theoretical argument that sequential contributions result in lower overall provision than...