32 research outputs found

    Characterizing Welfare-egalitarian Mechanisms with Solidarity When Valuations are Private Information

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    In the problem of assigning indivisible goods and monetary transfers, we characterize welfare-egalitarian mechanisms (that are decision-efficient and incentive compatible) with an axiom of solidarity under preference changes and a fair ranking axiom of order preservation. This result is in line with characterizations of egalitarian rules with solidarity in other economic models. We also show that we can replace order-preservation with egalitarian-equivalence or no-envy (on the subadditive domain) and still characterize the welfare-egalitarian class. We show that, in the model we consider, the welfare-egalitarian mechanisms appear to be the best candidates to satisfy several different fairness and solidarity requirements as well as generating bounded deficits.egalitarianism, solidarity, order preservation, egalitarian-equivalence, no-envy, distributive justice, NIMBY problems, imposition of tasks, allocation of indivisible (public) goods and money, the Groves mechanisms, strategy-proofness

    Equivalence of Resource/Opportunity Egalitarianism and Welfare Egalitarianism in Quasilinear Domains

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    We study the allocation of indivisible goods when monetary transfers are possible and preferences are quasilinear. We show that the only allocation mechanism (upto Pareto-indifference) that satisfies the axioms supporting resource and opportunity egalitarianism is the one that equalizes the welfares. We present alternative characterizations, and budget properties of this mechanism and discuss how it would ensure fair compensation in government requisitions and condemnations.egalitarianism, egalitarian-equivalence, no-envy, distributive justice, allocation of indivisible goods and money, fair auctions, the Groves mechanisms, strategy-proofness, population monotonicity, cost monotonicity, government requisitions, eminent domain

    On Scheduling Fees to Prevent Merging, Splitting and Transferring of Jobs

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    A deterministic server is shared by users with identical linear waiting costs, requesting jobs of arbitrary lengths. Shortest jobs are served first for efficiency. The server can monitor the length of a job, but not the identity of its user, thus merging, splitting or partially transferring jobs offer cooperative strategic opportunities. Can we design cash transfers to neutralize such manipulations? We prove that merge-proofness and split-proofness are not compatible, and that it is similarly impossible to prevent all transfers of jobs involving three agents or more. On the other hand, robustness against pair-wise transfers is feasible, and essentially characterize a one-dimensional set of scheduling methods. This line is borne by two outstanding methods, the merge-proof S+ and the split-proof S?. Splitproofness, unlike Mergeproofness, is not compatible with several simple tests of equity. Thus the two properties are far from equally demanding.

    Stability and fairness in sequencing games: optimistic approach and pessimistic scenarios

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    Sequencing deals with the problem of assigning slots to agents who are waiting for a service. We study sequencing problems as coalition form games defined in optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. Each agent's level of utility is his Shapley value payoff from the corresponding coalition form game. First, we show that while the core of the optimistic game is always empty, the Shapley value of the pessimistic game is an allocation in its core. Second, we impose the "generalized welfare lower bound" (GWLB) that ex-ante guarantees each agent a minimum level of utility. One of many application of GWLB is the "expected costs bound". It guarantees each agent his expected cost when all arrival orders are equally likely. We prove that the Shapley value payoffs (in both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios) satisfy GWLB if and only if it satisfies the expected costs bound (ECB)

    A welfarist approach to sequencing problems with incentives

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    We adopt a welfarist approach to study sequencing problems in a private information setup. The ”generalized minimum welfare bound” (GMWB) is a universal representation of all the specific bounds that have been previously studied in the literature. Every agent is offered a protection in the form of a minimum guarantee on their utilities. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition to identify an outcome efficient and strategy-proof mechanism that satisfies GMWB.We then characterize the entire class of mechanisms that satisfy outcome efficiency, strategy proofness and GMWB. These are termed as the class of ”relative pivotal mechanisms”. Our paper proposes relevant theoretical applications namely; ex-ante initial order, identical costs bound and expected cost bound. We also give insights on the issues of feasibility and/or budget balance

    Incentive and normative analysis on sequencing problem

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    In this paper we have analyzed sequencing problem from both incentive and normative aspects. We have identified unique class of VCG mechanisms that ensures egalitarian equivalence and we also have shown the possibility result with identical costs lower bound in that unique class of VCG mechanisms. Sequencing game imposes a stronger restriction on the possible set of “reference position”, compared to queuing game and that, in turn results into the failure of having a feasible VCG mechanism along with egalitarian equivalence. Although we found the necessary and sufficient condition for the above mentioned unique class of egalitarian equivalent VCG mechanism to satisfy identical costs lower bound when the number of participating agents is two, necessary condition for the same for more than two agents remains an open question. Lastly, we contemplate a situation where the restriction that sequencing problem imposes on “reference position” is overlooked, that is, we assume almost no restriction (except the fact that it must be positive) on reference waiting time and identify the class of VCG mechanism that is egalitarian equivalent

    Fair Allocation Rules

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    Allocating Indivisible Items in Categorized Domains

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    Abstract We formulate a general class of allocation problems called categorized domain allocation problems (CDAPs), where indivisible items from multiple categories are allocated to agents without monetary transfer and each agent gets at least one item per category. We focus on basic CDAPs, where the number of items in each category equals to the number of agents. We characterize serial dictatorships for basic CDAPs by a minimal set of three desired properties: strategyproofness, non-bossiness, and category-wise neutrality. Then, we propose a natural extension of serial dictatorships called categorical sequential allocation mechanisms (CSAMs), which allocate the items in multiple rounds: in each round, the active agent chooses an item from a designated category. We fully characterize the worst-case ordinal efficiency of CSAMs for optimistic and pessimistic agents. We believe that these constitute a promising first step towards theoretical foundations and applications of general CDAPs
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