Public Policy and the Private Provision of Public Goods under Heterogeneous Preferences
比较了促进公共物品私人提供的次优政策效率，发现最低标准通常比统一价格激励更有效，并分析了异质性对政策选择的影响。
We compare the relative efficiency of second-best policies designed to promote the private provision of public goods. We use the provision of local public goods as our central example and discuss settings in which the model extends to choices over energy-consuming durables. We introduce preference heterogeneity by allowing a subset of agents to value the public good more than others, reflecting a form of prosocial preference. We further assume that agents face convex costs of provision, an assumption that accords well with individually provided public goods such as neighborhood amenities. We show that minimum standards are often more efficient than uniform price-based incentives in this setting. Extending our model to allow for both benefit and cost heterogeneity, we show how policy choice depends on the strength and correlation between the two forms of heterogeneity.