A utilitarian approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods

The paper studies utilitarian welfare maximization in a model with an excludable public good where individual preferences are private information. If inequality aversion is large, optimal allocations involve the use of admission fees and exclusion to redistribute resources from people who benefit a lot from the public good to people who benefit little. If inequality aversion is close to zero, optimal admission fees are zero. These results are robust if earning abilities provide an additional source of heterogeneity and income taxation an additional policy instrument.

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