Comparative static properties of the solution to an optimal nonlinear income tax problem are provided for a model in which the government both designs an income tax schedule for redistributive purposes and provides a public good optimally. There are two types of individuals, distinguished by...

We develop a discrete or finite household model with congestable local public goods where the level of provision, the number of facilities and their locations are all endogenously determined in a purely normative context. We prove the existence of an equal-treatment identical-provision second...

We test two recent theories on the subject of charitable fundraising in capital campaigns. Andreoni (1998) predicts that publicly announced seed contributions can increase the total amount of charitable giving in a capital campaign. Bagnoli and Lipman (1989) predict that another technique for...

We introduce a concept of status equilibrium for local public good economies. A status equilibrium specifies one status index for each agent in an economy. These indices determine agents' cost shares in any possible jurisdiction to which the agent might belong. We provide an axiomatic...

We consider a general equilibrium economy with public goods and externalities. Following Boyd and Conley (1997), we treat externality markets directly instead of indirectly through Arrovian commodities. Because such direct externality markets are not subject to the nonconvexities that Starrett...

James Buchanan (Economica, 1966) has argued that Alfred Marshall's theory of jointly-supplied goods can be extended to analyze the allocation of impure public goods. This article introduces a way of modelling sharing technologies for jointly-supplied goods that captures the essential features of...

We introduce a perfect price discriminating (PPD) mechanism for allocation problems with private information. A PPD mechanism treats a seller, for example, as a perfect price discriminating monopolist who faces a price schedule that does not depend on her report. In any PPD mechanism, every...

We develop and explore a new model of the economics of privacy. Previous work has focused on "privacy of type," wherein an agent privately knows an immutable characteristic. We consider "privacy of action," wherein privacy means that an agent's choice of action is unobservable to others. To show...

Important economic thinkers such as Sen, Arrow and Harsanyi have argued for the existence of multiple preference orderings, allowing individuals to make choices, both when only private welfare is at stake and when the good of some collective is involved. Further, recent literature has shown that...

We consider a general equilibrium local public goods economy in which agents have two distinguishing characteristics. The first is 'crowding type,' which is publicly observable and provides direct costs or benefits to the jurisdiction (coalition or firm) the agent joins. The second is taste...