Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress's promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains highly uneven across the country. Most...

Many public policies seek to promote, maintain, modify or improve collective actions. The development of a country requires actions that are complex and wide in scope. This and following texts sort out: i) two general classes of problem-situations that lack collective action; and ii) kinds of...

The problem of coordination concerns how to make actions or choices of social agents (individuals or organizations) match in the right way. Some problems of coordination are also problems of separation. In many cases of lack of coordination, communication is faulty or not very reliable....

Problems of collective action are at the roots of several public policies and, as shown in this text, there are many mechanisms and tools to be used in order to solve those problems. Although three groups of mechanisms and tools have not been stressed in the usual debates of public policy, they...

In a world without intellectual property protection, inventors have an incentive to sell (and firms have an incentive to buy) inventions as secrets. In this paper, I give a general framework about how a market for secret inventions can operate. Specifically, I model the auction as a game between...

It is often asserted that public goods either do not ‘exist', or that goods exist on some kind of vague spectrum between “purely public” and “purely private” goods. This is because of a conceptual muddling between public goods and private goods. I present a new conceptual framework for...

“Separate but equal” legally sanctioned segregation in public schools until Brown. Ever since, separate but free has been the prevailing dogma excusing segregation. From “freedom of choice” plans that facilitated massive resistance to desegregation to current school choice plans...

This article argues that cultural values can act as dominant norms and subvert the state’s official law in the awarding of post-disaster shelters to Typhoon Ondoy (Tropical Storm Ketsana) victims in a housing project in the Philippines. Applying some tenets of legal pluralism and some...

Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress's promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains highly uneven across the country. Most...

This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and examination of communications failures during the...