We show that an asymptotic envy-freeness is a necessary condition for a form of robust approximate implementation in large economies. We are grateful for financial support from the National Science Foundation under grant SES-9986190. We thank Andy Postlewaite for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Division of Humanities and Social Sciences 228-77, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena...

We formulate and study the requirement on an allocation rule that no agent should be able to benefit by augmenting his endowment through borrowing resources from the outside world (alternatively, by simply exaggerating it). We show that the Walrasian rule is not “borrowing-proof” even on standard domains. More seriously, no efficient selection from the endowments-lower-bound correspondence, or ...

We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to agents. Existing literature that focuses on the concept of envy inherently assumes that each agent can observe which goods the other agents are allocated before deciding if she envies them. In this paper, we propose a novel policy in which the principal hides from each agent the allocations made to the other agents. Each agent now a...

We extend the classic cake-cutting problem to a situation in which the ”cake” is divided among families. Each piece of cake is owned and used simultaneously by all members of the family. A typical example of such a cake is land. We examine three ways to assess the fairness of such a division, based on the classic no-envy criterion: (a) Average envy-freeness means that for each family, the avera...

Human emotions are socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Emotions are shaped by social processes and social forces. Emotions are social as well as psychological phenomena, responses to social situations that are shaped by social learning. However useful it may be to consider emotions as physiological or as psychological events, the sociological study of emotions draws attention to of...

Facing a protagonist's emotional mental state can trigger social emotions (or 'fortune of others' emotion), such as envy or gloating, which reflect one's assessment of the consequences of the other's fortune. Here we suggest that these social emotions are mediated by the mentalizing network. The present article explores the notion that the understanding of social competitive emotions is particu...

A set of jobs need to be served by a server which can serve only one job at a time. Jobs have processing times and incur waiting costs (linear in their waiting time). The jobs share their costs through compensation using monetary transfers. In the first part, we provide an axiomatic characterization of the Shapley value rule by introducing some fairness axioms that are new in the literature. In...

In economics the main efficiency criterion is that of Pareto-optimality. For problems of distributing a social endowment a central notion of fairness is no-envy (each agent should receive a bundle at least as good, according to her own preferences, as any of the other agent’s bundle). For most economies there are multiple allocations satisfying these two properties. We provide a procedure, base...

In a series of 4 experiments, we provide evidence that--in addition to having an affective component--envy may also have important consequences for cognitive processing. Our first experiment (N = 69) demonstrated that individuals primed with envy better attended to and more accurately recalled information about fictitious peers than did a control group. Studies 2 (N = 187) and 3 (N = 65) concep...