Coordinating charitable donations with Leontief preferences

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Brandt, Felix; Greger, Matthias; Segal-Halevi, Erel; Suksompong, Warut
• 署名单位: Technical University of Munich; Universite PSL; Universite Paris-Dauphine; Ariel University; National University of Singapore
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2025.106096
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: private provision; public-goods; equilibrium

摘要

We consider the problem of funding public goods that are complementary in nature. Examples include charities handling different needs (e.g., protecting animals vs. providing healthcare), charitable donations to different individuals, or municipal units handling different issues (e.g., security vs. transportation). We model these complementarities by assuming Leontief preferences; that is, each donor seeks to maximize an individually weighted minimum of all contributions across the charities. Decentralized funding may be inefficient due to a lack of coordination among the donors; centralized funding may be undesirable as it ignores the preferences of individual donors. We present a mechanism that combines the advantages of both methods. The mechanism efficiently distributes each donor's contribution so that no subset of donors has an incentive to redistribute their donations. Moreover, it is group-strategyproof, satisfies desirable monotonicity properties, maximizes Nash welfare, returns a unique Lindahl equilibrium, and can be implemented via natural best-response spending dynamics.