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Secession-Proofness in Large Heterogeneous Societies

Michel Le Breton, Shlomo Weber and Jacques Drèze

Abstracts

This paper examines the model of multi-jurisdictional formation considered by Alesina and Spolaore (1997) and Le Breton and Weber (2003), where the distribution of individuals is given by Lebesgue measure over a bounded interval. Every jurisdiction chooses a location of a public good and shares its cost of production among its residents. In addition, each individual incurs a transportation cost. We consider a notion of secession-proof allocation where no group of individuals can make all its members better or by choosing both a location of the public good and a cost-sharing mechanism among its own members. We examine secession-proof allocations and show that they may fail to satisfy some desirable requirements, including the Rawlsian principle. We show however that secession-proofness can be reconciled with an approximate Rawlsian principle in large societies.

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References

Electronic reference

Michel Le Breton, Shlomo Weber and Jacques Drèze, “Secession-Proofness in Large Heterogeneous Societies”Économie publique/Public economics [Online], 17 | 2005/2, Online since 11 May 2007, connection on 22 May 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/economiepublique/2704; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/economiepublique.2704

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About the authors

Michel Le Breton

Université de Toulouse I, Gremaq & Idei

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Shlomo Weber

CORE, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and Department of Economics, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA

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Jacques Drèze

CORE, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

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Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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