Axiomatic and Strategic Analysis of Resource Allocation Rules

该项目的目标是构造满足吸引力的分配规则。特别注意公平和不受操纵性行为影响的规则。该项目研究讨价还价、税收、私人物品的分配、公共物品的分配和不可分割的物品的分配。总的来说，经济学家对公平的规范性问题没有给予足够的重视，许多公众关心的重要问题被忽视了太久：谁应该为救灾买单？军事联盟的成本应该如何分配？高管的薪酬合理吗？和平红利该如何分配？工业化国家和第三世界国家之间的收入差距可以接受吗？支持分配规则的最有说服力的论点是它满足吸引人的性质，在本研究中，规则的性质，而不是规则本身，是起点。我们将分析几种性质。单调性属性规定，所有代理都应该受到其环境变化的同一方向的影响；这些变化可以是在资源、技术、人口等方面。一致性属性保证了当一些代理带着他们的收益离开现场时，规则所提出的建议永远不会与它所提出的建议相矛盾。逆性质允许我们根据决策对小群体的可取性来推断整个经济决策的可取性。防策略说，该规则为代理人提供了动机，让他们说出他们控制的数据的真相。研究规则的可操作性和可实施性确实应该是任何关于机制设计的全面研究计划的组成部分。这项研究非常重要，因为它将有助于追踪哪些社会目标组合是兼容的，哪些不是，考虑到代理人的战略行为之间的边界。

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.