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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Soldiers Of Fortune, Ted Bergstrom
Soldiers Of Fortune, Ted Bergstrom
Ted C Bergstrom
This paper shows that if workers have identical wealths, abilities, and preferences then a draft lottery is Pareto superior to a voluntary army. It also shows that if being a civilian is a "normal good", then the optimal pay schedule will be such that people prefer not being chosen for the army. The paper shows how this idea extends to occupational choice in general and shows that pure gambles taken prior to occupational choice can substitute for lotteries that determine one's occupation. This paper repairs what I think is a major flaw in standard general equilibrium theory, which assumes away …
On The Private Provision Of Public Goods, Ted Bergstrom, Hal Varian, Larry Blume
On The Private Provision Of Public Goods, Ted Bergstrom, Hal Varian, Larry Blume
Ted C Bergstrom
We consider a general model of the non-cooperative provision of a public good. Under very weak assumptions there will always exist a unique Nash equilibrium in our model. A smallredistribution of wealth among the contributing consumers will not change the equilibrium amount of the public good. However, larger redistributions of wealth will change the set of contributors and thereby change the equilibrium provision of the public good. We are able to characterize the properties and the comparative statics of the equilibrium in a quite complete way and to analyze the extent to which government provision of a public good ‘crowds …