IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed010/1185.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Toward an Efficiency Rationale for the Public Provision of Private Goods

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Norman

    (UNC Chapel Hill)

  • Hanming Fang

    (Upenn)

Abstract

This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals consume both public and private goods. The government's involvement in the provision of private goods provides it with information about individuals' private good purchases that facilitates more efficient revenue extraction for the provision of public goods. We show that public provision of the private good improves economic efficiency under a condition that is always fulfilled under stochastic independence and satisfied for an open set of joint distributions. Our model is an example where there is an efficiency loss from separating revenue and expenditure problems, and is therefore of more general interest for the study of optimal taxation.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Norman & Hanming Fang, 2010. "Toward an Efficiency Rationale for the Public Provision of Private Goods," 2010 Meeting Papers 1185, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed010:1185
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bruce, Neil & Waldman, Michael, 1991. "Transfers in Kind: Why They Can Be Efficient and Nonpaternalistic," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(5), pages 1345-1351, December.
    2. Tilman Börgers & Peter Norman, 2009. "A note on budget balance under interim participation constraints: the case of independent types," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 39(3), pages 477-489, June.
    3. Schmitz, Patrick W, 1997. "Monopolistic Provision of Excludable Public Goods under Private Information," Public Finance = Finances publiques, , vol. 52(1), pages 89-101.
    4. Nichols, Albert L & Zeckhauser, Richard J, 1982. "Targeting Transfers through Restrictions on Recipients," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 72(2), pages 372-377, May.
    5. Hellwig, Martin F., 2005. "A utilitarian approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(11-12), pages 1981-2003, December.
    6. Sören Blomquist & Vidar Christiansen & Luca Micheletto, 2010. "Public Provision of Private Goods and Nondistortionary Marginal Tax Rates," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 2(2), pages 1-27, May.
    7. Blomquist, Soren & Christiansen, Vidar, 1999. "The political economy of publicly provided private goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 31-54, July.
    8. Charles F. Manski, 2010. "When consensus choice dominates individualism: Jensen's inequality and collective decisions under uncertainty," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 1(1), pages 187-202, July.
    9. Robin Boadway & Maurice Marchand & Motohiro Sato, 1998. "Subsidies versus Public Provision of Private Goods as Instruments for Redistribution," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 100(3), pages 545-564, September.
    10. Roberts, John, 1976. "The incentives for correct revelation of preferences and the number of consumers," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(4), pages 359-374, November.
    11. Boadway, Robin & Keen, Michael, 1993. "Public Goods, Self-Selection and Optimal Income Taxation," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 34(3), pages 463-478, August.
    12. Besley, Timothy & Coate, Stephen, 1991. "Public Provision of Private Goods and the Redistribution of Income," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(4), pages 979-984, September.
    13. Kimura, Masako & Yasui, Daishin, 2009. "Public provision of private child goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(5-6), pages 741-751, June.
    14. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2010. "Optimal Provision of Multiple Excludable Public Goods," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 1-37, November.
    15. Borck, Rainald & Wrohlich, Katharina, 2011. "Preferences for childcare policies: Theory and evidence," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 436-454, September.
    16. Bergstrom, Ted & Blomquist, Soren, 1996. "The political economy of subsidized day care," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 443-457, November.
    17. Coate, Stephen, 1995. "Altruism, the Samaritan's Dilemma, and Government Transfer Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(1), pages 46-57, March.
    18. Hellwig, Martin F., 2007. "The provision and pricing of excludable public goods: Ramsey-Boiteux pricing versus bundling," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(3-4), pages 511-540, April.
    19. Peter Norman, 2004. "Efficient Mechanisms for Public Goods with Use Exclusions," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(4), pages 1163-1188.
    20. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2006. "To bundle or not to bundle," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 37(4), pages 946-963, December.
    21. Jukka Pirttilä & Sanna Tenhunen, 2008. "Pawns and queens revisited: public provision of private goods when individuals make mistakes," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 15(5), pages 599-619, October.
    22. Firouz Gahvari & Enlinson Mattos, 2007. "Conditional Cash Transfers, Public Provision of Private Goods, and Income Redistribution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(1), pages 491-502, March.
    23. Atkinson, A. B. & Stiglitz, J. E., 1976. "The design of tax structure: Direct versus indirect taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1-2), pages 55-75.
    24. Blackorby, Charles & Donaldson, David, 1988. "Cash versus Kind, Self-selection, and Efficient Transfers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(4), pages 691-700, September.
    25. repec:bla:scandj:v:100:y:1998:i:3:p:545-64 is not listed on IDEAS
    26. Cremer, Helmuth & Gahvari, Firouz, 1997. "In-kind transfers, self-selection and optimal tax policy," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 97-114, January.
    27. Roger B. Myerson, 1981. "Optimal Auction Design," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 6(1), pages 58-73, February.
    28. Gouveia, Miguel, 1997. "Majority Rule and the Public Provision of a Private Good," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 93(3-4), pages 221-244, December.
    29. Bergstrom, Ted & Blomquist, Soren, 1996. "The political economy of subsidized day care," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 443-457, November.
    30. Gilat Levy, 2005. "The Politics of Public Provision of Education," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(4), pages 1507-1534.
    31. John Riley & Richard Zeckhauser, 1983. "Optimal Selling Strategies: When to Haggle, When to Hold Firm," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 98(2), pages 267-289.
    32. George J. Mailath & Andrew Postlewaite, 1990. "Asymmetric Information Bargaining Problems with Many Agents," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 57(3), pages 351-367.
    33. Mas-Colell, Andreu & Whinston, Michael D. & Green, Jerry R., 1995. "Microeconomic Theory," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195102680.
    34. Epple, Dennis & Romano, Richard E, 1996. "Public Provision of Private Goods," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 104(1), pages 57-84, February.
    35. Martin F. Hellwig, 2003. "Public-Good Provision with Many Participants," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 70(3), pages 589-614.
    36. Norman,P., 2000. "Efficient mechanisms for public goods with use exclusions," Working papers 15, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
    37. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2006. "To bundle or not to bundle," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 37(4), pages 946-963, December.
    38. Janet Currie & Firouz Gahvari, 2008. "Transfers in Cash and In-Kind: Theory Meets the Data," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(2), pages 333-383, June.
    39. Garratt, Rod & Marshall, John M, 1994. "Public Finance of Private Goods: The Case of College Education," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(3), pages 566-582, June.
    40. Guesnerie, Roger & Roberts, Kevin, 1984. "Effective Policy Tools and Quantity Controls," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(1), pages 59-86, January.
    41. R. Preston McAfee & John McMillan & Michael D. Whinston, 1989. "Multiproduct Monopoly, Commodity Bundling, and Correlation of Values," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 104(2), pages 371-383.
    42. repec:bla:scandj:v:97:y:1995:i:4:p:547-67 is not listed on IDEAS
    43. William James Adams & Janet L. Yellen, 1976. "Commodity Bundling and the Burden of Monopoly," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 90(3), pages 475-498.
    44. Raquel Fernandez & Richard Rogerson, 1995. "On the Political Economy of Education Subsidies," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 62(2), pages 249-262.
    45. Nancy L. Stokey, 1979. "Intertemporal Price Discrimination," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 93(3), pages 355-371.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. One rationale for the public provision of public goods
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2009-02-28 01:33:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Charles F. Manski, 2010. "When consensus choice dominates individualism: Jensen's inequality and collective decisions under uncertainty," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 1(1), pages 187-202, July.
    2. Economides, George & Philippopoulos, Apostolis & Sakkas, Stelios, 2017. "Tuition fees: User prices and private incentives," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 91-103.
    3. Houqe, Muhammad Nurul & van Zijl, Tony & Karim, A.K.M. Waresul & George, Thomas St, 2021. "The value relevance of corporate donations," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    4. María Amelia Gibbons & Alessandro Maffioli & Martín Rossi, 2016. "Money for Wine?: Complementarities in the Provision of Private and Public Goods to Wine Producers," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 94217, Inter-American Development Bank.
    5. Marcelo Arbex & Flavia Chein & Isabela Furtado & Enlinson Mattos, 2017. "Publicly Provided Private Goods and Informal Labor Supply," Working Papers 1710, University of Windsor, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2010. "Optimal Provision of Multiple Excludable Public Goods," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 1-37, November.
    2. Janet Currie & Firouz Gahvari, 2008. "Transfers in Cash and In-Kind: Theory Meets the Data," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(2), pages 333-383, June.
    3. Blomquist, Soren & Christiansen, Vidar, 1999. "The political economy of publicly provided private goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 31-54, July.
    4. Hellwig, Martin F., 2007. "The provision and pricing of excludable public goods: Ramsey-Boiteux pricing versus bundling," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(3-4), pages 511-540, April.
    5. Gasparini, Leonardo C. & Pinto, Santiago M., 2006. "Equality of opportunity and optimal cash and in-kind policies," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(1-2), pages 143-169, January.
    6. David Domeij, 2013. "Should Day Care be Subsidized?," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 80(2), pages 568-595.
    7. Lopez-Rodriguez, David, 2011. "The Political Economy of In-Kind Redistribution," MPRA Paper 44152, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2012.
    8. Martin Hellwig, 2004. "Optimal Income Taxation, Public-Goods Provision and Public-Sector Pricing: A Contribution to the Foundations of Public Economics," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2004_14, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    9. Sören Blomquist & Vidar Christiansen, 2003. "Is there a Case for Public Provision of Private Goods if Preferences are Heterogeneous? An Example with Day Care," CESifo Working Paper Series 938, CESifo.
    10. Lopez-Rodriguez, David, 2011. "The scope of political redistribution with proportional income taxation," MPRA Paper 44150, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2012.
    11. Sören Blömquist & Vidar Christiansen, 1998. "Price Subsidies Versus Public Provision," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 5(3), pages 283-306, July.
    12. Matthew Greenblatt, 2020. "In-kind transfers and home production," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(4), pages 1189-1211, December.
    13. Blomquist, Sören & Christiansen, Vidar, 2004. "Welfare Enhancing Marginal Tax Rates: The Case of Publicly Provided Day Care," Arbetsrapport 2004:6, Institute for Futures Studies.
    14. Alessandro Balestrino, 2000. "Mixed Tax Systems and the Public Provision of Private Goods," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 7(4), pages 463-478, August.
    15. Simona GRASSI, 2006. "On the characteristics of a mixed system of provision of a private good. An application to health care," Departmental Working Papers 2006-14, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    16. Fang,H. & Norman,P., 2003. "An efficiency rationale for bundling of public goods," Working papers 19, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
    17. Blomquist, Soren & Christiansen, Vidar, 1998. "Topping Up or Opting Out? The Optimal Design of Public Provision Schemes," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(2), pages 399-411, May.
    18. Hellwig, Martin F., 2005. "A utilitarian approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(11-12), pages 1981-2003, December.
    19. Zohal Hessami & Silke Uebelmesser, 2016. "A political-economy perspective on social expenditures: corruption and in-kind versus cash transfers," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 17(1), pages 71-100, February.
    20. Robin Boadway, 2011. "Viewpoint: Innovations in the theory and practice of redistribution policy," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 44(4), pages 1138-1183, November.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed010:1185. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.