This paper considers a house allocation problem with no initial ownership and where prices are bounded from below and above by exogenously given price restrictions. This type of housing market contains, e.g., the “assignment market” and the “student placement problem” as special cases. A mechanism called the minimal RPE mechanism is defined, and two main results are obtained. First, it is demon...

We model group formation as a response to relative deprivation. We employ a simple measure of relative deprivation. We show that the process of deprivationinduced self-selection into groups reaches a unique steady state. We study the social welfare implications of the deprivation-induced process of group formation and show that when individuals are left to pursue their betterment the resulting ...

Conditions α and β are two well-known rationality conditions in the theory of rational choice. This paper examines the implications of weaker versions of these two rationality conditions in the context of solutions to nonconvex bargaining problems. It is shown that, together with the standard axioms of efficiency and strict individual rationality, they imply rationalizability of solutions to no...

Decision making of agents who are members of a society is analyzed from the point of view of quantum decision theory. This generalizes the approach, developed earlier by the authors for separate individuals, to decision making under the influence of social interactions. The generalized approach not only avoids paradoxes, typical of classical decision making based on utility theory, but also exp...

We investigate the adverse selection problem where a principal delegates multiple tasks to individuals. The individuals form a group as a single agent and share their private signals in order to maximize their average payoff. We characterize the virtually implementable social choice functions by using the linking mechanism proposed by Jackson and Sonnenschein (2005) that restricts the message s...

A class of voting procedures based on repeated ballots and elimination of one candidate in each round is shown to always induce an outcome in the top cycle and is thus Condorcet consistent, when voters behave strategically. This is an important class as it covers multi-stage, sequential elimination extensions of all standard one-shot voting rules (with the exception of negative voting), the sam...

We examine properties of binary relations that complement quasi-transitivity and Suzumura consistency in the sense that they, together with the original axiom(s), are equivalent to transitivity. In general, the conjunction of quasi-transitivity and Suzumura consistency is strictly weaker than transitivity but in the case of collective choice rules that satisfy further properties, the conjunctio...

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi’s model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting interpersonal comparability of welfare. We show that the veil-of-ignorance conception of John Harsanyi, so completed, and Ronald Dworkin’s, when modeled formally, recommend...

We study house allocation problems introduced by Shapley and Scarf (1974). We prove that a mechanism (a social choice function) is individually rational, anonymous, strategy-proof, and non-bossy (but not necessarily Pareto efficient) if and only if it is either the core mechanism or the no-trade mechanism, where the no-trade mechanism is the one that selects the initial allocation for each prof...

We consider situations in which agents are not able to completely distinguish between all alternatives. Preferences respect individual objective indi erences if any two alternatives are indi erent whenever an agent cannot distinguish between them. We present necessary and su cient conditions of such a domain of preferences under which majority rule is quasi-transitive and thus Condorcet winners...