It is generally acknowledged that the government’s output is difficult to define and its value is hard to measure. The practical solution, adopted by national accounts systems, is to equate output to input costs. However, several studies estimate significant inefficiencies in government...

This paper extends the analogy, previously established by Learner (1978a), between a Bayesian inference problem and an economics allocation problem to show that posterior modes can be interpreted as optimal outcomes of a bargaining game. This bargaining game, over a parameter value, is played...