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Collective consumption and benefit characterize many government services. Moreover, government services are mostly paid for collectively through taxes—there is little or no relationship between the taxes paid by a household and its use of a particular service. Public sector decision makers face complex budget problems with difficult solutions. Involving citizens meaningfully in these decisions has long been a conundrum. The authors teamed up with the town of West Hartford, Connecticut, to develop a Web‐based survey to overcome some of these participation problems and help decision makers better understand citizen preferences. The Web survey allowed for real‐time interactivity and was tailored to present respondents with trade‐offs between service levels and taxes.
Robbins et al. (Mon,) studied this question.