An Exploration of Incentive-Compatible ELIE

Abstract

[Simula and Trannoy, 2011] have shown that ELIE is confronted with implementation issues when the policymaker cannot observe the time worked by every individual. This paper tries to fix this problem. To this aim, we characterise the second-best allocations which are the closest to ELIE first in terms of welfare and then in terms of transfers. In the former perspective, we consider a welfarist setting in which the social weights are those required by ELIE to be generated as a first-best allocation. These weights are defined by the tangent hyperplane to the first-best Pareto set at the ELIE allocation. We show that, in the absence of income effect on labour supply, the closest solution to ELIE is the laissez-faire. In addition, simulations for a Cobb–Douglas economy show that the second-best transfers may then be substantially different from ELIE. This is why, in the latter perspective, we construct second-best allocations which are both incentive-compatible and generate net transfers coinciding with the first-best ELIE transfers. We show that the unique solution is Pareto-efficient in the constraint set.