Strategy-proof location of public bads in a two-country model

We consider the joint decision of placing public bads in each of two neighboring countries, modelled by two adjacent line segments. Residents of the two countries have single-dipped preferences, determined by the location of the nearest public bad to their dips. A social choice function or rule takes a profile of reported preferences as input and assigns the location of the public bad in each country. All rules satisfying strategy-proofness, country-specific Pareto optimality, non-corruptibility, and the far away condition are characterized. These rules pick only boundary locations

Strategy-proof location of public bads in a two-country model

We consider the joint decision of placing public bads in each of two neighboring countries, modeled by two adjacent line segments. Residents of the two countries have single-dipped preferences, determined by the distance of their dips to the nearer public bad (myopic preferences) or, lexicographically, by the distance to the nearer and the other public bad (lexmin preferences). A (social choice) rule takes a profile of reported preferences as input and assigns the location of the public bad in each country. For the case of myopic preferences, all rules satisfying strategy-proofness, country-wise Pareto optimality, non-corruptibility, and the far away condition are characterized. These rules pick only border locations. The same holds for lexmin preferences under strategy-proofness and country-wise Pareto optimality alone. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Locating an Optimal Site for a Controversial Facility

We consider a situation in which policymakers in a local community have to choose an optimal site for a controversial and essential project in a democratic setting. Policymakers have either single-dipped or multi-dipped preferences over a Euclidean space of possible locations. We provide two existence results for this issue. There exists at most two optimal sites if the size of policymakers is odd, and they have single-dipped preferences over a one-dimensional site space

Still Toxic After All These Years: Air Quality and Environmental Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area

From West Oakland's diesel-choked neighborhoods to San Francisco's traffic-snarled Mission District to the fenceline communitis abutting Richmond's refineries, poor and minority residents of the San Francisco Bay Area get more than their share of exposure to air pollution and environmental hazards. That's the conclusion of a new report issued by the Center for Justice, Tolerance & Community (CJTC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The first published analysis of the overall state of environmental disparity in the nine-county region, the report is entitled, "Still Toxic After All These Years... Air Quality and Environmental Justice in the Bay Area.

Privacy as a Public Good

Privacy is commonly studied as a private good: my personal data is mine to protect and control, and yours is yours. This conception of privacy misses an important component of the policy problem. An individual who is careless with data exposes not only extensive information about herself, but about others as well. The negative externalities imposed on nonconsenting outsiders by such carelessness can be productively studied in terms of welfare economics. If all relevant individuals maximize private benefit, and expect all other relevant individuals to do the same, neoclassical economic theory predicts that society will achieve a suboptimal level of privacy. This prediction holds even if all individuals cherish privacy with the same intensity. As the theoretical literature would have it, the struggle for privacy is destined to become a tragedy. But according to the experimental public-goods literature, there is hope. Like in real life, people in experiments cooperate in groups at rates well above those predicted by neoclassical theory. Groups can be aided in their struggle to produce public goods by institutions, such as communication, framing, or sanction. With these institutions, communities can manage public goods without heavy-handed government intervention. Legal scholarship has not fully engaged this problem in these terms. In this Article, we explain why privacy has aspects of a public good, and we draw lessons from both the theoretical and the empirical literature on public goods to inform the policy discourse on privacy

Media Capture in a Democracy: The Role of Wealth Concentration

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media. The media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence the public opinion. In the case of voting over the level of a productivity-enhancing public bad, it is shown that an increase in the concentration of firm ownership makes the occurrence of media bias more likely. Although media bias is not always welfare worsening, conditions for it to raise welfare are restrictive.mass media, public bads, voting, wealth inequality

Mechanisms for division problems with single-dipped preferences

A mechanism allocates one unit of an infinitely divisible commodity among agents reporting a number between zero and one. Nash, Pareto optimal Nash, and strong equilibria are analyzed for the case where the agents have single-dipped preferences. One of the main results is that when the mechanism is anonymous, monotonic, standard, and order preserving, then the Pareto optimal Nash and strong equilibria coincide and assign Pareto optimal allocations that are characterized by so-called maximal coalitions: members of a maximal coalition prefer an equal coalition share over obtaining zero, whereas the outside agents prefer zero over obtaining an equal share from joining the coalition