Efficient Mechanisms for Public Goods with Use Exclusions

摘要

Constrained efficient provision of an excludable public good is studied in a model where preferences are private information.The provision level is asymptotically deterministic,making it possible to approximate the optimal mechanism with a mechanism that provides a fixed quantity of the good and charges fixed user fees for access.In general,the fixed fees involve third degree price discrimination,but,if names are uninformative about preferences,the analysis provides a justification for average cost pricing.Being able to limit a public goods' consumption does not make it a turn-blue private good.For what,after all,are the true marginal costs of having one extra family tune in on the program.They are literally zero.Why then limit any family which would receive positive pleasure from tuning in on the program from doing so? (Samuelson,1958,p.335).