We use a novel approach to address the question of whether a union of sovereign countries can efficiently raise and allocate a budget, even when members are purely self-interested and participation is voluntary. The main innovation of our model is to explore the link between budget contributions...

This paper examines the incentives of voters to appoint legislators with different preferences from their own. The paper adopts an underlying legislative bargaining model proposed by Volden and Wiseman (2007) in which legislators with heterogeneous preferences divide a fixed budget between a...

This paper studies the application of the notion of secure implementation (Cason, Saijo, Sj¨ostr¨om, and Yamato, 2006; Saijo, Sj¨ostr¨om, and Yamato, 2007) to the problem of allocating indivisible objects with monetary transfers. We propose a new domain-richness condition, termed as minimal...

We present a legislative bargaining model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizion. In each period, there is a societal endowment which can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the optimal public policy, defined by the time path of...

We delineate the various ways in which rights to environmental and other resources can be assigned to individuals or groups. We then examine models of individual and group interactions, drawing out their implications for the ways in which resources will be utilized and managed under various...

The paper starts from the hypothesis that the public good index (PGI) could be much more successful if it were introduced by a more prominent game theorist. It argues that the violation of local monotonicity, inherent to this measure of a priori voting power, can be an asset – especially if...

We model club formation as a non-cooperative game of coalition formation and surplus division. We show how social norms and individual rationality sustain a particular form of collective inefficiency, namely excessive entry in the joint production and exploitation of an excludable good. We term...

This paper studies the application of the notion of secure implementation (Cason, Saijo, Sjostrom, and Yamato, 2006; Saijo, Sjostrom, and Yamato, 2007) to the problem of allocating indivisible objects with monetary transfers. We propose a new domain-richness condition, termed as minimal richness. We...

We study the interdependence of optimal tax and expenditure policies. An optimal policy requires that information on preferences is made available. We first study this problem from a general mechanism design perspective and show that efficiency is possible only if the individuals who decide on...