期刊名称：CORE Discussion Papers / Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
出版年度：2002
卷号：2002
出版社：Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
摘要：In this paper we examine a collective decision problem, where the set of heteroge-
neous individuals is partitioned into several groups, each choosing its own policy (e.g.,
location of a public project) from the given policy space. We first consider the notion
of “efficient” partition that minimizes the total policy-related costs and aggregate per-
sonalized costs. We then examine “sustainable” partitions, in which the policy-related
costs can be distributed in a way that no subgroup (belonging to the partition or not)
has an incentive to break away from the rest and to set its own policy. Our main result
is that, with a unidimensional policy space and single-peaked personalized costs, every
efficient partition is sustainable. We further describe some important features of effi-
ciency by characterizing the efficient distribution (and number) of policies chosen from
the policy space when their cost is small. It turns out that efficiency is achieved when
the distribution of policies follows the square root of the density of individuals’ ideal
choices.
