How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Aufteilung eines Budgets auf mehrere öffentliche Güter mittels einer Abstimmung. Hierzu betrachten wir Abstimmungsregeln, unter denen jeder Agent eine Budgetaufteilung vorschlägt und dann aus diesen Vorschlägen eine Budgetaufteilung (Allokation) bestimmt...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest - which we call a 'tax lottery' - can...

It has long been known that when agents have von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences over lotteries, there is an incompatibility between strategy-proofness and efficiency (Gibbard, [9]; Hylland, [12]) - a solution satisfying those properties must be dictatorial. We strengthen this result by showing...

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others’ selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals’ prosociality and punishment. In...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest — which we call a ‘tax lottery' —...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

We reconsider the well known Becker-Coase (BC) argument, according to which changes in divorce laws should not affect divorce rates, in the context of households which consume public goods in addition to private goods. For this result to hold, utility must be transferable both within marriage...

Implementing a project, like a nationwide nuclear waste disposal, which benefits all involved agents but brings major costs only to the host is often problematic. In practice, revelation issues and redistributional concerns are significant obstacles to achieving stable agreements. We address...