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Tullock, Tideman, and the Origins of the Demand-Revealing Process

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Public Choice, Past and Present

Part of the book series: Studies in Public Choice ((SIPC,volume 28))

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Abstract

One of Gordon Tullock’s contributions to economics was his decision in 1971 to publish in Public Choice a dense paper by a doctoral student that made the startling claim that it was possible to motivate people to report their preferences for public goods truthfully. Tullock reported that, while he did not understand the paper when he accepted it, he decided to publish it because if it was right, it was important. Here I report events surrounding the process by which that idea came to be understood by Tullock, by me, and by others.

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Notes

  1. 1.

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  2. 2.

    University of Chicago, 1969.

  3. 3.

    Smolensky E, Nichols D, Tideman N (1972) Waiting time as a congestion charge. In: Mushkin S (ed) Public prices for public products. The Urban Institute, pp 95–108.

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    Clarke EH (1971) Multipart pricing of public goods. Public Choice 11:17–33.

  7. 7.

    Public Choice, 29-2 (1977).

  8. 8.

    Incentives in Teams. Econometrica 41(4):617, 1973.

  9. 9.

    Zeckhauser R (1968) Essay II, group decision and allocation. In: Studies in interdependence, doctoral thesis, Department of Economics, Harvard University, pp 33–34.

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    Coase RH (1960) J Law Econ 3:1–44.

  11. 11.

    Coase RH The problem of social cost, p. 41.

  12. 12.

    Econometrica 45(4):783–809, 1977.

  13. 13.

    For a more complete discussion of why the Groves-Ledyard approach to the problem of public goods is not promising, see Chap. 7, Why Nash Solutions are Not Solutions, of M. Bailey, Constitution for a Future Country, Palgrave, 2001.

  14. 14.

    The way to translate from money to utility was explained in I.J. Good (1977) Justice in voting by demand revelation. Public Choice 29(2):65–70.

  15. 15.

    This is a variation on the point made by Tibor Scitovsky in “A Note on Welfare Propositions of Economics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility,” Review of Economic Studies, 1941.

  16. 16.

    For a more thorough discussion of this point, see N. Tideman, Collective Decisions and Voting: The Potential for Public Choice (Ashgate, 2006): 304–310.

  17. 17.

    For details, see Nicolaus Tideman and Gordon Tullock (1976) A new and superior process for making social choices. J Pol Econ 84 (Dec):1145–1159.

  18. 18.

    Tiebout CM (1956) A pure theory of local expenditures. J Polit Econ 64(5):416–424.

  19. 19.

    Green J, Laffont J-J (1977) Imperfect personal information and the demand-revealing process: a sampling approach. Public Choice 29(Supplement 2):79–94; Green J, Laffont J-J (1978) An incentive compatible planning procedure for public good production. Scand J Econ 80(1):20–33; Green J, Laffont J-J (1979) On coalition incentive compatibility. Rev Econ Stud 46(2):243–254.

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Correspondence to Nicolaus Tideman .

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Tideman, N. (2013). Tullock, Tideman, and the Origins of the Demand-Revealing Process. In: Lee, D. (eds) Public Choice, Past and Present. Studies in Public Choice, vol 28. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5909-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5909-5_10

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