NIMBY on the edge: a one-dimensional model of NIMBY facility siting

The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) facility siting problem is a social choice problem that arises when a public good with negative externalities is to be located in a community. In this article, we construct a simple model that focuses on the relationship between social choice regarding NIMBY facilities and the population distribution of residents in a city. Specifically, we model a city as a distribution of residents in onedimensional space and examine the properties of social welfare, which is the sum of the single-dipped utility that each resident receives from NIMBY facilities. As a result, we find that regardless of the distribution of residents, the social welfare of the edge of the city is maximized as a choice for the installation of NIMBY facilities. This simple but powerful finding is partially confirmed by Japanese data, which shows that the location of municipal solid waste facilities, a typical NIMBY facility, tends to be near the boundary of municipalities.