[A simple scheme for making governmental decisions about the production and financing of public goods is presented. The "competitive" equilibria under the scheme are Pareto optimal; more importantly, they are Lindahl equilibria. Thus, it is never in any individual's interest to refuse to participate (no one will be worse off at the equilibrium than at his initial holding); moreover, the existence of equilibria is assured in the usual classical public-goods economies.]

[In a broad class of situations not covered by the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem it is shown that one cannot design a strategy-proof choice mechanism which attains Pareto optimal outcomes. The results are shown to be genetic in character--i.e., any nonmanipulable mechanism will attain nonoptimal outcomes virtually everywhere--and they cover, in particular, certain problems of allocating public and private goods. The analysis is carried out in transferable utility environments, and makes extensive use of the mechanisms recently introduced by Groves.]

[Green and Laffont have characterized certain appealing dominant-strategy revelation mechanisms as precisely the mechanisms introduced by Groves, but they have established the characterization only for unstructured sets of public alternatives: if the set has some natural structure, their proof generally requires that pathological preferences be admissible. It is shown here that the same characterization holds on sets in R extasciicircumn, even when only nice preferences are admitted; this greatly extends the usefulness of the characterization.]

Leonid Hurwicz, Mark Walker, On the Generic Nonoptimality of Dominant-Strategy Allocation Mechanisms: A General Theorem That Includes Pure Exchange Economies, Econometrica, Vol. 58, No. 3 (May, 1990), pp. 683-704