Abstract
Mirrlees demonstrated that in a town in which land is a consumer good, identical individuals should not in general have equal utilities at the social welfare optimum. One aim of this paper is to provide a simple exposition and intuitive explanation of this result, and to investigate the determinants of the distribution of utilities at the social welfare optimum. The cause of this inequality is shown to be an individual-specific asymmetry in aggregate production possibilities. Another aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the essential results of Mirrlees' optimum town paper generalize to all situations with this form of production asymmetry.
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