Axiomatic and Strategic Analysis of Resource Allocation Rules

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The objective of this project is to construct allocation rules satisfying appealing properties. Special attention is paid to rules that are equitable and immune to manipulative behavior. The project studies bargaining, taxation, allocation of private goods, allocation of public goods, and allocation of indivisible goods. In general, economists do not pay enough attention to normative issues of fairness and many important questions that the general public cares about have been neglected for too long: Who should pay for disaster relief? How should the cost of military alliances be distributed? Are the salaries of executives justified? How should the "peace dividend" be allocated? Is the income disparity between industrialized countries and countries of the Third World acceptable? The most convincing argument one can make in favor of an allocation rule is that it satisfies appealing properties and, in this research, properties of rules, not the rules themselves, are the starting point. Several kinds of properties will be analyzed. Monotonicity properties state that all agents should be affected in the same direction by changes in their environment; these changes can be in resources, technology, population, etc. Consistency properties guarantee that the recommendation made by a rule is never contradicted by the recommendation it makes when some of the agents leave the scene with their payoffs. The converse property allows us to deduce the desirability of a decision for a whole economy on the basis of its desirability for small subgroups. Strategy-proofness says that the rule provides agents the incentive to tell the truth about the data over which they have control. Studying the manipulability and the implementability of rules should indeed be components of any comprehensive research program on mechanism design. This study is very important because it will help trace out the boundary between which combinations of social objectives are compatible and which are not, taking into account the strategic behavior of agents.