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 characterize the Pareto-frontier in a simple Mirrleesian model of income taxation. We show how the second-best frontier which incorporates incentive constraints due to private information on productive abilities relates to the first-best frontier which takes only resource constraints into...

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...

We consider a sequential game in which one player produces a public good and the other player can influence this decision by making an unconditional transfer. An efficient allocation requires the Lindahl property: the sum of the two (implicit) individual prices has to be equal to the resource...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

Using the aggregative game approach as developed by Cornes and Hartley (2003, 2007) this paper analyzes the conditions under which matching mechanisms in a public good economy lead to interior matching equilibria in which all agents make strictly positive flat contributions to the public good....

Power market integration is analyzed in a two countries model with nationally regulated firms and costly public funds. If generation costs between the two countries are too similar negative business-stealing outweighs efficiency gains so that following integration welfare decreases in both...

In this paper we experimentally investigate whether partial coercion can in combination with conditional cooperation increase contributions to a public good. We are especially interested in the behavior of the non-coerced populations. The main finding is that in our setting conditional...