The scope of satisfactory mechanisms for the provision of public goods

This paper establishes the existence of satisfactory public-good provision mechanisms when utilities are nonseparable. The assumptions used to obtain this result are: (1) that the public good is continuously variable; (2) that utility functions are parametrically representable and twice continuously differentiable; and (3) that the provision rule is a strictly increasing function of the reported marginal rates of substitution between the public good and the private good. The satisfactory mechanisms derived are all augmented Groves mechanisms and are equivalent to Groves mechanisms if, and only if, each consumer's utility function is additive in income.