We examine incentive-compatible mechanisms for fair financing and efficient selection of a public budget (or public good). A mechanism selects the level of the public budget and imposes taxes on individuals. Individuals' preferences are quasilinear. Fairness is expressed as weak monotonicity (called scale monotonicity) of the tax imposed on an individual as a function of his benefit from an increased level of the public budget. Efficiency is expressed as selection of a Pareto-optimal level of the public budget. The budget deficit is the difference between the public budget and the total amount of taxes collected from the individuals. We show that any efficient scale-monotonic and incentive-compatible mechanism may generate a budget deficit. Moreover, it is impossible to collect taxes that always cover a fixed small fraction of the total cost.

The asymptotic value, introduced by Kannai in 1966, is an asymptotic approach to the notion of the Shapley value for games with infinitely many players. A vector measure game is a game v where the worth v(S) of a coalition S is a function f of u(S) where u is a vector measure. Special classes of vector measure games are the weighted majority games and the two-house weighted majority games, where a two-house weighted majority game is a game in which a coalition is winning if and only if it is winning in two given weighted majority games. All weighted majority games have an asymptotic value. However, not all two-house weighted majority games have an asymptotic value. In this paper, we prove that the existence of infinitely many atoms with sufficient variety suffice for the existence of the asymptotic value in a general class of nonsmooth vector measure games that includes in particular two-house weighted majority games.

Four axioms are placed on a correspondence from smooth, non-atomic economies to their allocations. We show that the axioms categorically determine the (coincident) competitive-core-value correspondence. Thus any solution is equivalent to the above three if, and only if, it satisfies the axioms. In this sense our result is tantamount to an "equivalence principle." At the same time, our result implies that the three solutions themselves are determined by the axioms and so serves as an axiomatic characterization of the well-known competitive (or core, or value) correspondence.