| Abstract: | This paper proposes a scheme to facilitate the siting of noxious facilities. A regional government announces that it will (a) use a lottery to choose a site for a noxious facility and (b) transfer income from tenants to host-city landowners to at least partly offset the effects of the noxious facility on local property values. The government will hold the lottery only if all citizens agree, in advance, to abide by the resulting siting decision. The lottery approach is superior to the conventional approach to siting (advance notification) in the sense that the lottery approach achieves unanimous support for the siting decision with less compensation. The compensation scheme can be financed with a regionwide tenant tax or a tax on residents in the nonhost city. For “small” compensation programs, the nonhost tax is superior to the regional tax. |
