An axiomatic approach to egalitarianism in TU-games

A core concept is a solution concept on the class of balanced games that exclusively selects core allocations. We show that every continuous core concept that satisfies both the equal treatment property and a new property called independence of irrelevant core allocations (IIC) necessarily selects egalitarian allocations. IIC requires that, if the core concept selects a certain core allocation for a given game, and this allocation is still a core allocation for a new game with a core that is contained in the core of the first game, then the core concept also chooses this allocation as the solution Javier Arin gratefully acknowledges the financial support by EHU, project nr, UPV 035.321-HB048/97 and by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, project nr, SEJ2006-05455. Jeroen Kuipers gratefully acknowledges the financial support by the Basque Government, Department of Research and Education. Dries Vermeulen gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research NWO. We thank two referees, an associate editor and Peter Sudhölter for their remarks that helped to improve the presentation of this article considerably. J. Arin Departamento Fundamentos del Análisis Económico I, Universidad del País Vasco EHU Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales Avda, Lehendakari Agirre 83, 48015 Bilbao, Spain e-mail: [email protected] J. Kuipers Department of Mathematics, University of Maastricht, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] D. Vermeulen (B) Department of Quantitative Economics, University of Maastricht, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]