This Paper discusses the economic merits of direct or indirect governmental support for open source projects. Software markets differ from standard textbook markets in three important respects that may give rise to market failures: (i) large economies of scale, (ii) crucially important...

This paper dels with optimal taxation in a two-class economy with two private commodities and labour. We derive optimal non-linear income and linear commodity taxes in the presence of merit goods. We formulate merit goods arguments via pathology of individual choice. We assume weak separability...

Public enterprises (PEs) have played a dominant role in Tanzania's socio-economic development. However, there enterprises have contributed significantly to economic crises presently facing the country. Precisely, they have been a fiscal and monetary burden to the economy. The main objective of...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model of environmental externalities with a depollution technology. each agent concerned by the environmental degradation can volutary contribute in order to reduce it. Contributing to the environmental quality means financing depollution activities...

A number of recent results in mechanism design literature show that in virutally all mechanism design environments of interest, as long as agents' private information is correlated. It is possible to design mechanisms that leave agents with arbitrarily small information rents. Thus, while agents...

In this paper charity brings some joy of giving; it yields more contributions to public goods than standard "subscription", but its creation is costly. We compare the laissez-faire number of charities with both the second and the first-best level. In general, laissez-faire implies an...

In the present paper, we adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior-which supposes that each household member is characterized by his/her own preferences and that the decision process results in Pareto-efficient outcomes-and assume, in addition, that agents are egoistic and consumption...

In this paper charity brings some joy of giving; it yields more contributions to public goods than standard "subscription", but its creation is costly. We compare the laissez-faire number of charities with both the second and the first-best level. In general, laissez-faire implies an...

This paper analyses the decision to invest to reduce the emissions of a stock pollutant under environmental uncertainty. It shows that this decision depends on the type and level of uncertainty. When uncertainty is small, there is no simple irreversibility effect because of the tension between...