The Pigovian rule for the optimal public goods provision with distortionary taxation is given a new interpretation. It relates the Pigovian rule to project evaluation rules in terms of shadow prices. Our formula for the Pigovian rule is compared with that given by existing literature for cases...

This paper studies public good provision in the laboratory using voluntary contribution mechanism, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan.

This paper presents data from experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries.

Groves-Ledyard (1977) constructed a mechanism attaining Pareto efficient allocations in the presence of public goods. After this path-breaking paper, many mechanisms have been proposed to attain desirable allocations with public goods. Thus, economists have thought that the free-rider problem is...