We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

This paper surveys what can be learned from recent advances in the incomplete contract literature to understand how public goods are or should be provided. The paper starts with a section on the full information case that presents and discusses the classical Samuelson condition on the optimal...

We show that bounds like those of Al-Najjar and Smorodinsky (J. Econ. Theory, 2000) as well as of Gradwohl et al. (Math. Oper. Res., 2009) on the number of alpha-pivotal agents can be obtained by decomposition of variance. All these bounds have a similar asymptotic behaviour, up to constant...

In every democracy mass media play a crucial role in assuring the effective working of the political system. In this paper I focus on the role of media as "watchdog". In an agency relationship between politician and citizens, media perform the function of an informed supervisor. Previous works...

This paper analyzes incentives for polluting firms to exchange abatement cost information under the non-linear pollution tax scheme ('differential tax') introduced by Kim and Chang [J. Regul. Econom. 5, 1993, 193-197]. It shows that polluting firms have - under mild conditions - an incentive to...

We consider how a benevolent regulator should regulate a polluting export industry when the industry, having private information about its abatement efficiency, has an option to move its operations abroad, with a type-dependent outside option rent. The paper focuses on the case where outside...

Regulating an export firm (or a homogeneous industry) with private information about emission technology is analysed, when the firm, owned partly by foreigners, has an option to bypass domestic regulation through costly relocation. If the firm chooses to relocate, it will set up a new plant in a...

This paper analyzes incentives for polluting firms to exchange abatement cost information under the non-linear pollution tax scheme ( differential tax') introduced by Kim and Chang [J. Regul. Econom. 5, 1993, 193-197]. It shows that polluting firms have - under mild conditions - an incentive to...

Based on the critical assumption of strategic complementarity, this paper builds a general model to describe and solve the screening problem faced by the monopolist seller of a network good. By applying monotone comparative static tools, we demonstrate that the joint presence of asymmetric...