Except for Bierbrauer (2005), all of the papers that have been reported on so far have a fundamental weakness: They are unable to articulate the question of what is the proper amount of resources to be devoted to public goods provision. In these models, a version of the law of large numbers implies that cross-section distributions of public goods valuations are commonly known. Given this information, the efficient amount of public goods provision, first-best, second-best, or fifty-sixth-best, is also known. The only information problem that remains is the assignment problem of who has a high valuation and who has a low valuation for the public good. This assignment problem matters for the distribution of financing contributions but not for the decision on how much of the public good to provide.

As explained in the introduction, we consider it important to have a theoretical formulation which makes it possible to articulate the question of what is the proper amount of resources to be devoted to public goods provision without relying on the small-economy assumption that each individual can have an impact on the level of public-good provision and is aware of this impact. Development of such a formulation has been a major task in the period 2006 – 2007.