Institutional Constraints and Local Community Formation
批评了城市政府最优性模型，主张地方社区的经济分析应转向制度安排的正向分析，而非规范模型构建。
The interest of economists in alternative patterns of urban government stems primarily from the publication of papers by Charles M. Tiebout and George J. Stigler. While these papers were essentially positive in orientation, subsequent work explored the normative properties of various models of urban government. These normative models, which have been surveyed exhaustively by Kenan Bulutoglu, have predominantly focused on the external costs that units of government impose on one another. While particular models vary, the general framework is quite uniform. A model is postulated in which the activity of one jurisdiction influences positively the utility level of residents of other jurisdictions. The analyst then postulates an independent adjustment equilibrium, and concludes that this equilibrium is inefficient because individual jurisdictions fail to take into account the impact of their actions on other jurisdictions. Albert Breton, Wallace E. Oates, Mancur Olson, and Gordon Tullock attributed this nonoptimality to the inappropriate specification of boundaries, for the benefit range of the publicly provided service fails to coincide with the boundary of the jurisdiction providing the service. Once it is suggested that some boundaries are better than others, the principles of community formation or boundary selection come to the fore of the economic analysis of local government. Optimality models of club or community formation have been developed by such authors as Martin C. McGuire, A. Mitchell Polinsky, and Hirofumi Shibata, these various works all being inspired by James M. Buchanan's (1965) theory of clubs. This paper advances the thesis that the economic analysis of local government and community formation should deemphasize the construction of normative models, and should concentrate instead on the positive analysis of alternative institutional arrangements. The first section of this paper argues that the economic analysis of urban government should become less neoclassical and more institutionalist because optimality models can never be related to social reality independently of the institutional framework within which collective choices emerge. The second section moves beyond methodological exhortation to the description of some institutional research, with this description serving to reinforce the theme of the first section.