Achieving stability in heterogeneous societies: multi-jurisdictional structures, and redistribution policies

Consider a “linear world” populated by several agents. These agents’ locations are identified with optimal variety of a horizontally differentiated local public good. Agents are to be partitioned into several communities (hereafter, groups), and each group chooses a variety of public good to be produced and consumed by members of that group via the majority voting procedure. It is shown that a stable partition may fail to exist, where stability means that no potential group would like to secede and form a new community. At the same time, compensation schemes are proposed which guarantee the existence of a stable partition. Small societies are studied in detail, as well as certain special types of distributions of agents’ locations.