时间：4月24日（周四）10:00-11:30

地点：北京大学经济学院302

主讲人：Claudio Mezzetti（Colin Clark Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland）

主持老师：吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；胡岠（国发院）

参与老师：胡涛，吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；汪浩，胡岠，邢亦青（国发院）；翁翕，刘烁（光华）

题目: Public Goods, Social Alternatives, and the Lindahl-VCG Relationship

摘要：Lindahl prices, set by a fictitious auctioneer with full knowledge of values and costs, are a generalization of Walrasian prices. By making the efficient allocation utility- and profit-maximizing for all participants, they induce an efficient outcome in a decentralized way even in the presence of public goods. We study a collective choice model with quasilinear utility, which encompasses the allocation of public and private goods as special cases. We show that each agent's smallest Lindahl price for the efficient alternative is equal to his VCG transfer while the firm's VCG transfer is equal to the largest sum of Lindahl prices. Thus, the VCG mechanism incurs a deficit if and only if the set of vectors of the agents' Lindahl prices for the efficient alternative is multi-valued. Unlike Walrasian prices, Lindahl prices are not restricted to be anonymous or linear. This is the reason why, when considering the allocation of private goods, the agents' smallest Walrasian payments are at least as large as their smallest Lindahl prices, and thus their VCG transfers. It is also why Lindahl prices always exist while Walrasian prices may not.

主讲人介绍：Claudio Mezzetti (Oxford DPhil) is the Colin Clark Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland. Previous positions include: Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne, Leverhulme Professor of Industry and Organisation, University of Warwick, Professor of Economics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Mezzetti is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. He is a microeconomic theorist whose main interests are in mechanism design, game theory and information economics. He has also worked in industrial organization, law and economics, international trade and public economics.