Social Choice and Welfare最新文献

We consider a housing market model with limited externalities where agents care both about their own consumption via demand preferences and about the agent who receives their endowment via supply preferences [we extend the associated lexicographic preference domains introduced in Klaus and Meo (Econ Theory 76:779- 811, 2023)]. If preferences are demand lexicographic, then our model extends the classical Shapley-Scarf housing market (Shapley and Scarf, J Math Econ 1:23-37, 1974) with strict preferences model. Our main result is a characterization of the corresponding top trading cycles (TTC) rule by individual rationality, pair efficiency, and strategy-proofness (Theorem 1), which extends that of Ekici (Theo Econ 19:551-564, 2024) from classical Shapley-Scarf housing markets with strict preferences to our model. Two further characterizations are immediately obtained by strengthening pair efficiency to either Pareto efficiency or pairwise stability (Corollaries 1 and 2). Finally, we show that as soon as we extend the preference domain to include demand lexicographic as well as supply lexicographic preferences (e.g., when preferences are separable), no rule satisfying individual rationality, pair efficiency, and strategy-proofness exists (Theorem 2).

We study how the timing and the type of donation decisions affect charitable giving. In an online real-effort experiment with a subsistence income constraint, participants could donate to a charity either before or after they worked to generate income. We find no evidence that timing affects the propensity to donate or the amounts donated. However, if a donation is expressed as a share of future income rather than an absolute amount, more people donate and they donate larger amounts. Advance commitment does not appear to have a motivational effect on effort. Our findings suggest that requesting donations as a share of future income may enhance charitable giving.

This paper studies the allocation of multiple copies of indivisible objects to agents with multi-object demands in the absence of monetary transfers. We look for a welfare-maximizing ordinal mechanism in an incomplete information setting where agents’ preferences are privately known. Our main finding establishes the significant welfare gains of the so-called Ranking mechanism. When each agent’s type (values for objects) is independently drawn from an exchangeable distribution, the Ranking mechanism yields higher interim utility for all agents compared to any symmetric equilibrium of any other symmetric ordinal mechanism, regardless of the agents’ cardinal values.

We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the literature on Interactive Democracy, our model allows the voters to actively determine the degree to which the system is direct versus representative. However, unlike Liquid Democracy, Flexible Representative Democracy uses strictly non-transitive delegations, making delegation cycles impossible, and maintains a fixed set of accountable, elected representatives. We present Flexible Representative Democracy and analyze it using a computational approach with issues that are binary and symmetric. We compare the outcomes of various voting systems using Direct Democracy with majority voting as an ideal baseline. First, we demonstrate the shortcomings of Representative Democracy in our model. We provide NP-Hardness results for electing an ideal set of representatives, discuss pathologies, and demonstrate empirically that common multi-winner election rules for selecting representatives do not perform well in expectation. To analyze the effects of adding delegation to representative voting systems, we begin by providing theoretical results on how issue-specific delegations determine outcomes. Finally, we provide empirical results comparing the outcomes of various voting systems: Representative Democracy, Proxy Voting, and FRD with issue-specific delegations. Our results show that variants of Proxy Voting yield no discernible benefit over unweighted representatives and reveal the potential for Flexible Representative Democracy to improve outcomes as voter participation increases.

A number of rules for resolving majority cycles in elections have been proposed in the literature. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit (J Theor Polit 33:475–524, 2021) axiomatically characterized the class of rules refined by one such cycle-resolving rule, dubbed Split Cycle: in each majority cycle, discard the majority preferences with the smallest majority margin. They showed that any rule satisfying five standard axioms plus a weakening of Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), called Coherent IIA, is refined by Split Cycle. In this paper, we go further and show that Split Cycle is the only rule satisfying the axioms of Holliday and Pacuit together with two additional axioms, which characterize the class of rules that refine Split Cycle: Coherent Defeat and Positive Involvement in Defeat. Coherent Defeat states that any majority preference not occurring in a cycle is retained, while Positive Involvement in Defeat is closely related to the well-known axiom of Positive Involvement (as in J Pérez Soc Choice Welf 18:601–616, 2001). We characterize Split Cycle not only as a collective choice rule but also as a social choice correspondence, over both profiles of linear ballots and profiles of ballots allowing ties.

We consider classes of non-manipulable social choice functions with range of cardinality at most two within a set of at least two alternatives. We provide the functional form for each of the classes we consider. This functional form is a characterization that explicitly describes how a social choice function of that particular class selects the collective choice corresponding to a profile. We provide a unified formulation of these characterizations using the new concept of “character”. The choice of the character, depending on the class of social choice functions, gives the functional form of all social choice functions of the class.

A common assumption in matching markets is that both sides fully know their preferences. However, when there are many participants this may be neither realistic nor feasible. Instead, agents may have some partial (perhaps stochastic) information about alternatives and will invest time and resources to better understand the inherent benefits and tradeoffs of different choices. Using the framework of matching medical residents with hospital programs, we study strategic behaviour by residents in a setting where hospitals maintain a publicly known master list of residents (i.e., all hospitals have an identical ranking of all the residents, for example, based on grades) and residents have to decide with which hospitals to interview, before submitting their preferences to the matching mechanism. We first show the existence of pure strategy equilibrium under very general conditions. We then study the setting when residents’ preferences are drawn from a known Mallows distribution. We prove that assortative equilibrium (k top residents interview with k top hospitals, etc.) arises only when residents interview with a small number of programs. Surprisingly, such equilibria (or even weaker notions of assortative interviewing) do not exist when residents can interview with many hospital programs, even when residents’ preferences are very similar. Simulations on possible outcome equilibrium indicate that some residents will pursue a reach/safety strategy.

We adopt the notion of the farsighted stable set to determine which matchings are stable when agents are farsighted in matching markets with couples. We show that a singleton matching is a farsighted stable set if and only if the matching is stable. Thus, matchings that are stable with myopic agents remain stable when agents become farsighted. Examples of farsighted stable sets containing multiple non-stable matchings are provided for markets with and without stable matchings. For couples markets where the farsighted stable set does not exist, we propose the DEM farsighted stable set to predict the matchings that are stable when agents are farsighted.

We define a class of pure exchange Edgeworth trading processes that under minimal assumptions converge to a stable set in the space of allocations, and characterise the Pareto set of these processes. Choosing a specific process belonging to this class, that we define fair trading, we analyse the trade dynamics between agents located on a weighted network. We determine the conditions under which there always exists a one-to-one map between the set of networks and the set of limit points of the dynamics, and derive an analog of the Second Welfare Theorem for networks. This result is used to explore what is the effect of the network topology on the trade dynamics and on the final allocation.

I analyze the role of the distribution of skills in shaping optimal nonlinear income tax schedules. I use theoretical skill distributions as well as empirical skill distributions for 14 OECD countries. I find that a more dispersed log-normal skill distribution implies a more progressive optimal tax schedule. Optimal marginal tax rates should be lower throughout if a greater number of unskilled agents cluster at the bottom, and the scheme is more progressive if a greater number of agents locate at the top. I also highlight how the impact of the skill distribution is affected by the form of the social welfare function and the utility function. The findings using empirical skill distributions suggest that the results are sensitive to the type of statistical estimator used to estimate the skill distribution.