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...

Analyses of public goods regularly address the case of pure public goods. However, a large number of (international) public goods exhibit characteristics of different degrees of publicness, i.e. they are impure public goods. In our analysis of transfers helping to overcome the inefficient...

In this paper we show how the Kolm triangle method, which is a standard tool for visualizing allocations in a public good economy, can also be used to provide a diagrammatical exposition of matching mechanisms and their effects on public good supply and welfare. In particular, we describe, on...

We put forward a model of private goods with externalities. Agents derive benefit from communicating with each other. In order to communicate they need to have a language in common. Learning languages is costly. In this setting no individually rational and feasible Groves mechanism exists. We...