The Game Form Approach to Redistribution

This paper reviews the game form approach to redistributive policies. This approach provides a justification for studying tax systems as good institutional arrangements for reallocating resources in a heterogeneous society. After situating the problem of asymmetric information for public policy, the paper provides a short overview of the main concepts and results in implementation theory. Next, these tools are used to inquire about the possibility to decentralise the reallocation of resources in a production economy with the help of tax/transfer systems. Finally, the paper deals with some recent extensions of the theory. A simple example is used throughout to illustrate the different results.