Strategy-proof probabilistic mechanisms in economies with pure public goods. (Q1867532)

This paper is devoted to public good economies where agents are endowed with strictly convex continuous single-peaked preferences on a convex subset of the Euclidean space. Such type of economy arises for instance in the classical problem of allocating a given budget to finance the provision of several public goods where the agents have monotonically increasing strictly convex continuous preferences. A probabilistic mechanism assigns a probability distribution over the feasible alternatives to any profile of the reported preferences. The authors establish that any strategy-proof and strictly unanimous probabilistic mechanism has to be a random dictatorship. The random dictatorship from unanimity and strategy-proofness derives for the case of two agents. The \(n\)-agents result is derived by mathematical induction based on the two-agent result.