This paper studies optimal taxation in a class of economies in which agents have dispersed private information regarding aggregate shocks (commonly-relevant fundamentals such as aggregate productivity and demand conditions). The dispersion of information opens the door to inefficiencies that...

two mechanisms that implement the same allocation rule must yield the same expected payoffs to the agents and hence the same expected revenue regardless of the transfer scheme and of the information disclosed by the mechanism to the agents. We then use the result as a tool for designing profit...