Time: Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 1:30-2:30 p.m.

Venue: Guoshun Campus, Starr Building, Room 502

Topic: Designing Fair and Effective Ways to Fund Public Goods

Speaker: Professor Bo Chen, University of Warwick

Moderator: Professor Xiandong Zhang

Abstract:

How can a community decide whether to fund a shared project - such as a public facility, digital platform, or security upgrade - when everyone benefits but individuals value it differently? And how can this be done in a way that is fair, transparent, and budget-balanced?

This talk presents new research on how to design simple, truthful, and budget-balanced rules for deciding when to provide a public good and how to allocate its cost. We show that the best such rules take a highly intuitive form: each person is asked to cover a fixed share of the cost, and the project proceeds only if everyone's willingness to pay meets or exceeds that share. We explain when equal cost shares are appropriate, when they are not, and how these rules behave as the group becomes large.

We also discuss what happens when the requirement of exact budget balance is slightly relaxed. Allowing even a small degree of financial flexibility can substantially improve outcomes, bringing us much closer to what a fully efficient system would choose.

The seminar will present the main ideas without technical detail, highlighting the economic intuition behind fairness, incentives, and feasibility in decisions on shared projects.

Bio: Bo Chen is Professor at the University of Warwick, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the Operational Research Society, and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. He received the Management Research Award from the UK Economic and Social Research Council in 1997 and the Science and Innovation Award from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in 2007.