The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics
通过一个立法行为和立法机构的优化模型，解释了猪肉桶项目效率低下的政治原因，强调收益和成本的地理分布对政治代表制的影响，并推导出立法者选择超规模项目的条件。
This essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions. The model emphasizes the (economically arbitrary, from a welfare point of view) importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation. We explore the implications of a legislator's objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale.