Speaker: Loren Fryxell (Oxford)

Title: The Public Good Provision Problem Re-Examined

Format: Hybrid

Abstract: I write down from first principles the government's public good provision problem and, contrary to popular wisdom, find a solution. The statement of the problem is new, as is the solution. The solution satisfies a new participation constraint, a new fairness principle, and is strategy-proof, efficient, and asymptotically ex-post budget-balanced for large populations. Along the way, I show that a commonly used methodological simplification in mechanism design is not without loss, standard constraints used in mechanism design are not well-suited for such public good provision environments, and the most popular classical mechanism for public good provision, the Clarke mechanism, violates a basic fairness constraint---if nothing is produced, no one should pay.

Organiser: Changhwa

For more information, please contact the organiser.