Social Choice and Welfare最新文献

The classic cake cutting problem concerns the fair allocation of a heterogeneous resource among interested agents. In this paper, we study a public goods variant of the problem, where instead of competing with one another for the cake, the agents all share the same subset of the cake which must be chosen subject to a length constraint. We focus on the design of truthful and fair mechanisms in the presence of strategic agents who have piecewise uniform (i.e., approval) utilities over the cake. On the one hand, we show that the leximin solution is excludably truthful (meaning it is truthful when it can block each agent from accessing parts of the cake that the agent does not claim to desire) and moreover maximizes the guaranteed normalized egalitarian welfare among all excludably truthful and position oblivious mechanisms. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the maximum Nash welfare solution is excludably truthful for two agents (as it coincides with leximin in that case) but not in general. We also provide an impossibility result on truthfulness when blocking is not allowed, and adapt notions of representation to our setting.

John Broome (Proc Aristot Soc 91:87–101, 1990) has developed an influential theory of fairness, which has generated a thriving debate about the nature of fairness. In its initial conception, Broomean fairness is limited to a comparative notion. More recent commentators such as Hooker (Ethical Theory Moral Pract 8:329–52, 2005), Saunders (Res Publica 16:41–55, 2010), Lazenby (Utilitas 26:331–345, 2014), Curtis (Analysis 74:47–57, 2014) have advocated, for different reasons, to also take into account non-comparative fairness. Curtis’ (Analysis 74:47-57, 2014) theory does just that. He also claims that he furthers Broome’s theory by saying precisely what one must do in order to be fair. However, Curtis departs from Broome’s (Proc Aristot Soc 91:87-101, 1990) requirement that claims are satisfied in proportion to their strength. He neglects claim-strengths altogether and identifies claims with their amount. As a result, the theory of Curtis has limited scope. I present a theory of fairness that fulfils all three desiderata: it incorporates non-comparative fairness, it recognizes that claims have both amounts and strengths, and it tells us precisely what one must do in order to be fair.

We study the matching of workers to firms in which workers choose an observable and contractable effort after the match. If there are complementarities between a worker’s ability and a firm’s technology, positive assortative matching (PAM) is the only matching in any equilibrium and is the unique efficient matching. We investigate the effect of a policy that changes the matching of firms to workers from any matching to PAM, such as implementing a centralized clearing house. We characterize two sets of sufficient conditions on the production and cost functions under which the total output and welfare both increase. Under the first set of conditions, the increase in total output is an upper bound for the efficiency gain. In contrast, under the second set of conditions, the increase in total output is a lower bound for the efficiency gain. We identify a third set of conditions under which the total output decreases while welfare increases.

In this paper we propose a simple axiom which, along with the axioms of additivity (transfer) and dummy player, characterizes the Shapley value (the Shapley–Shubik power index) on the domain of TU (simple) games. The new axiom, cross invariance, demands payoff invariance on symmetric players across “quasi-symmetric games,” that is, games where excluding null players, all players are symmetric. Additionally, we demonstrate that the axiom of additivity can be replaced by a new axiom called strong monotonicity, or it can be completely dropped if a stronger version of cross invariance is employed. We also show that the weighted Shapley values can be characterized using a weighted variant of cross invariance. Efficiency is derived rather than assumed in our characterizations. This fresh perspective contributes to a deeper understanding of the Shapley value and its applicability.

Measuring inequality is a challenging task, particularly when data is collected in a coarse manner. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring inequality indices that considers all possible income values and avoids arbitrary statistical assumptions. Specifically, the paper suggests that two sets of income distributions should be considered when measuring inequality, one including the highest income per individual and the other including the lowest possible income per individual. These distributions are subjected to inequality index measures, and a weighted average of these two indices is taken to obtain the final inequality index. This approach provides more accurate measures of inequality while avoiding arbitrary statistical assumptions. The paper focuses on two special cases of social welfare functions, the Atkinson index and the Gini index, which are widely used in the literature on inequality.