Suggested contributions, membership categories, and discrete, incremental thank-you gifts are devices often used by benevolent associations that provide public goods. Such devices focus donations at discrete levels, thereby effectively limiting the donors' freedom to give. We study the effects...

We study the performance of the Quadratic Voting (QV) mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl (2016) in finite populations of various sizes using three decreasingly analytic but increasingly precise methods with emphasis on examples calibrated to the 2008 gay marriage referendum in California....

We examine the private provision of a public good whose level is determined by the least contribution of individual group members. Nash equilibrium can be efficient when the game is one of full information. This paper introduces private information about the costs of effort and characterizes...

We study group competition with a single public good prize, perfectly discriminating contest success function, and the weakest-link effort technology, in which the marginal cost of effort for each player is private information. We focus on pure strategy Bayes-Nash equilibria and show that...

We study the relation between the electorate's information about candidates' policy platforms during an election, and the subsequent provision of inefficient local public goods by the elected government. More information does not always lead to better outcomes. We show that the equilibrium...

We model competing groups when players' values for winning are private information, each group's performance equals the best effort ("best shot") of its members, and the group with the best performance wins the contest. At the symmetric equilibrium of symmetric contests, increasing the number of...

This paper studies "voluntary bargaining agreements" in an environment where preferences over an excludable public good are private information. Unlike the case with a non-excludable public good, there are non-trivial conditions when there is significant provision in a large economy. The...

We reconsider Laussel and Palfrey's (2003) analysis of private provision of a discrete public good via the subscription game. We show that the equilibria they define as semi-regular do not exist. Taking players' values for the public good as uniformly distributed on [vl, vh] with vl 0, we...

Lalley and Weyl (2016) propose a mechanism for binary collective decisions, Quadratic Voting, and prove its approximate efficiency in large populations in a stylized environment. They motivate their proposal substantially based on its greater robustness when compared with pre-existing efficient...

This article explores subjects in optimal income taxation characterized by recent research interest, practical importance in light of concerns about inequality, potential for misunderstanding, and prospects for advancement. Throughout, the analysis highlights paths for further investigation....