Kant and Lindahl*

Abstract

AbstractIn 1896 and 1919, respectively, Wicksell and Lindahl analyzed the public provision of public goods through parliamentary negotiation. Later, Roemer applied Kant's 1785 imperatives to the private provision of public goods by voluntary contributions. Our focal equilibrium notions are the balanced linear cost‐share equilibrium for the Wicksell–Lindahl approach and the multiplicative Kantian equilibrium in the Kant–Roemer modeling. These turn out to be fundamentally equivalent, being defined by the same individual optimization problem. These notions fit well with the idea that technology is publicly owned, but we also extend them to cover private‐ownership economies with exogenously given profit shares. We show that the equivalence between the Wicksell–Lindahl and Kant–Roemer notions carries over to them.