Coercion and social welfare in public finance : economic and political perspectives / Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, Georgia State University, Stanley L. Winer, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada.

1. Coercion, welfare, and the study of public finance / Jorge Martinez-Vazquez and Stanley L. Winer. Part I. Violence, structured anarchy, and the state. 2. The constitution of coercion: Wicksell, violence, and the ordering of society / John J. Wallis ; 3. Proprietary public finance: on its emergence and evolution out of anarchy / Stergios Skaperdas ; Discussion: a spatial model of state coercion / Leonard Dudley -- Part II. Voluntary and coercive transactions in welfare analysis. 4. Coercion, taxation, and voluntary association / Roger D. Congleton ; 5. Kaldor-Hicks coercion, Coasian bargaining, and the state / Michael C. Munger ; Discussion: a sociological perspective on coercion and social welfare / Edgar Kiser -- Part III. Coercion in public sector economics: theory and application. 6. Non-coercion, efficiency and incentive compatibility in public goods / John O. Ledyard ; 7. Social welfare and coercion in public finance / Stanley L. Winer, George Tridimas and Walter Hettich ; Discussion: the role of coercion in public economic theory / Robin Boadway ; 8. Lindahl fiscal incidence and the measurement of coercion / Saloua Sehili and Jorge Martinez-Vazquez ; Discussion: state-local incidence and the Tiebout model / George R. Zodrow ; 9. Fiscal coercion in federal systems, with special attention to highly divided societies / Giorgio Brosio ; Discussion: on coercion in divided societies / Bernard Grofman -- Part IV. Coercion in the laboratory. 10. Cooperating to resist coercion: an experimental study / Lucy F. Ackert, Ann B. Gillette and Mark Rider ; 11. Partial coercion, conditional cooperation, and self-commitment in voluntary contributions to public goods / Elena Cettolin and Arno Riedl ; Discussion: coercion in the lab! / Michael McKee.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Print version record.

"Coercion is a fundamental and unavoidable part of our social lives. Economists, however, have not yet offered a fully integrated analysis of its role in either the private or the public economy. The essays in this book are different. Since collective choices on fiscal matters emerge from and have all the essential characteristics of social interaction, including the necessity of coercion, and because there is an older tradition of work on coercion in public finance that we can build upon, the contributors to this book focus directly on the study of coercion arising through the operation of the fiscal system. A variety of important issues concerning the evolution, measurement, and implications of coercion in public finance are addressed. These include: the emergence and persistence of coercion in the financing of structured anarchies; its role in the transition from natural states to the open access society; the measurement of coercion and its connection to the foundations of welfare analysis and to the sociology of preference formation; coercion in mechanism design problems with public goods; as constraints on optimal policy design and under alternative collective choice rules; and coercion in federal states as a solution to problems of highly divided societies. The implications for contemporary tax policy of the Wicksell-Lindahl solution, for the calculation of the incidence of the fiscal system, and for experiments with coercion in laboratory settings as a potentially productive force are also explored"-- Provided by publisher

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