Demand Revelation and the Provision of Public Goods

About the Book

The demand revelation process has been called a new and superior process for making social choices and holds some promise of creating an intellectual revolution in economics and politics. It relies on a so-called “Clarke tax” or pivot mechanism to ensure that individuals will adequately consider the social cost of their influence on social outcomes, thereby ensuring truthful revelation of preferences and overcoming the “free rider” problem of public goods provisioning.

Demand Revelation and the Provision of Public Goods outlines Clarke’s approach to use demand revelation in the creation of demand revealing markets accompanied by the improved management of social entitlements to public goods and services. Based on these refinements, he shows ways to achieve improved government performance in areas of taxation, spending and government regulatory management. In this revised edition of his original 1980 book, Clarke reviews other recent related work, notably Martin Bailey’s Constitution for a Future Country, which describes in detail how these advances in an improved political economy can be achieved.

About the Author

Edward Clarke discovered the demand revealing process as a University of Chicago graduate student during the late 1960s. He has written extensively on the application of demand revealing processes which were noted in the 1996 Nobel Prize awards in economics. He is currently a senior economist with the Office of Management and Budget in the area of government regulatory management.