Auctions in Pricing Excludable Public Goods

在这个项目中，我们研究了使用拍卖机制来为多个人的社会提供公共项目。我们考虑一个公共项目，可以消费没有竞争的所有代理人，但个人的排斥是可能的。我们采用排他性作为经济政策的工具，以确保个人自愿参与项目。虽然关于项目成本的信息通常可以假设为规划者所知，但我们允许关于代理人的偏好和捐赠的信息是私有的。在这一框架下，问题变成了是否提供可排除的公共物品，包括谁，以及如何分担提供的费用。 我们借用拍卖理论，描述了两种分配排他性公共物品的“类拍卖”机制。第一种是基于递增出价的英式拍卖的机制，我们称之为“英式拍卖机制”。第二种是基于Vickrey的第二价格密封投标拍卖的机制，我们称之为“密封投标拍卖机制”。 正如Vickrey（1961）所言，我们证明了英式拍卖机制和密封投标拍卖机制都是策略证明，并且它们会导致等价的结果。此外，后者与Moulin（1994）提出的系列成本分摊规则和保守等成本规则密切相关。我们扩展了他的模型，通过限制可以非竞争性地消费商品的个人数量，也就是说，通过引入消费拥挤。价格扮演着双重角色，一方面是引导真实偏好的揭示，另一方面是分配商品的配给工具。 该项目的贡献有两个：表明莫林和维克里提出的规则属于同一个家族的扩展拍卖类机制，从而统一了两个以前独立的分支机构在文献中的机制设计;和字符化两个定义良好的拍卖类机制，可以被证明是容易实现的。 该项目构成了系统分析用于分配和定价可排除的公共产品的防策略机制的出发点。这是一个重要的方向，最终将导致更好地了解费用分摊规则、其业绩特点以及实际执行的方式。这项调查的结果有可能影响私人和公共组织分配稀缺资源的方式，以资助计算机网络，教育系统，政党，博物馆，图书馆，学校等活动，这些扩展将是未来NSF提案的主题。

In this project we study the use of auction mechanisms to provide a public project for a soci ety with multiple individuals. We consider a public project that can be consumed without rivalry by all agents but where exclusion of individuals is pos sible. We adopt excludability as an instrument of economic policy in order to ensure obtain voluntary participation by the individuals in the project. While the infor mation about the cost of the project can generally be assumed known to the planner, we allow the in formation about the agents' preferences and endow ments to be private. In this framework, the issues become whether or not to provide the excludable public good, whom to include, and how the costs of provision are to be shared. We borrow from the theory of auctions to charac terize two `auction-like` mechanisms for allocating excludable public goods. The first is a mechanism based on the increasing-bid, English auction we call the `English Auction-Like Mechanism.` The second is a mechanism based on Vickrey's second-price, sealed bid auction we call the `Sealed Bid Auction-Like Mechanism.` We show that, as in Vickrey (1961), the English Auction-Like Mechanism and the Sealed Bid Auction-Like Mechanism are strategy proof, and that they lead to equivalent outcomes. Moreover, the latter is closely related to the serial cost sharing rule and the conser vative equal cost rule, proposed by Moulin (1994). We extend his model by limiting the number of individuals who may consume the good non-rivalrously; that is, by introducing congestion in consumption. Prices play a dual role of in ducing truthful preference revelation and of a ra tioning device to allocate the good. The contributions of the project are two: to show that rules suggested by Moulin and Vickrey belong to the same family of extended auction-like mechanisms, thereby unifying two previously separate branches in the literature on mechanism design; and to character ize two well-defined auction-like mechanisms which can be shown to be easy to implement. This project constitutes the point of departure for a systematic analysis of strategy-proof mechanisms for allocating and pricing excludable public goods. This is an important direction which will ultimately result in a better understanding of cost sharing rules, their performance characteristics, and the ways in which they can be practically implemented. The re sults from this investigation have the potential to affect meaningfully the way private and public or ganizations allocate scarce resources to finance ac tivities such as computer networks, telecommunica tions systems, political parties, museums, libraries, schools, etc. These extensions will be the topic of a future full NSF proposal.