Most research in economics studies agents somehow motivated by outcomes. Here, we study agents motivated by procedures instead, where procedures are defined independently of an outcome. To that end, we design procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry the same information on others’ intentions while they have different outcomeinvariant properties. Agents are experimentally confi...

We consider “social contracts” which alter the payoffs of players in a noncoperative game, generating new Nash Equilibria (NE). In the domain of contracts which — in conjunction with their concomitant NE — are “self-financing”, our focus is on those that are (Pareto) optimal. By way of a key example, we examine optimal levels of crime and punishment in a population equilibrium. JEL Classificati...

We study the assignment of indivisible objects with quotas (universities, jobs, or offices) to a set of agents (students, job applicants, or professors). Each agent receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not possible. We characterize efficient priority rules by efficiency, strategy-proofness, and reallocation-consistency. Such a rule respects an acyclic priority structure an...

We study a simple model of assigning indivisible objects (e.g., houses, jobs, offices, etc.) to agents. Each agent receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not possible. We completely describe all rules satisfying efficiency, independence of irrelevant objects, and resource-monotonicity. The characterized rules assign the objects in a sequence of steps such that at each step t...

We examine experimentally how a person’s generosity depends on the degree of anonymity between giver and recipient, as well as on the parties’ sexes. Less is given when the giver is paid on stage rather than in private; men receive less than women; fewer men than women give non-zero amounts. The results suggest that it may be problematic to organize experimental data in terms of social distance...

We study the stabilitywith respect to the introduction of opportunitybased inequity aversion a la Dufwenberg et al. (2011) of three welfare properties satisfiedbycompetitive equilibria in self-regarding economies: (i) Pareto efficiencymay not be a stable property; (ii) undomination with respect to income redistribution is a stablepropertywhenever themarginal indirect utility of income has no ex...

Empirical Approaches to Inequality of Opportunity: Principles, Measures, and Evidence We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identifies and suggests several new p...

We consider the problem of allocating a finite number of indivisible items to two players with additive utilities. We design a procedure that looks for all the maximin allocations. The procedure makes repeated use of an extension of the Adjusted Winner, an effective procedure that deals with divisible items, to find new candidate solutions, and to suggest which items should be assigned to the p...

We present a series of non-cooperative games with monotone best replies whose set of Nash equilibria coincides with the set of stable matchings. Key features of stable matchings are established as familiar properties of games with monotone best replies. Then we present a sense in which our method is necessary for the monotonicity approach. We also establish the connection of our approach with o...

We study the assignment of indivisible objects with quotas (universities, jobs, or offices) to a set of agents (students, job applicants, or professors). Each agent receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not possible. We characterize efficient priority rules by efficiency, strategy-proofness, and reallocation-consistency. Such a rule respects an acyclic priority structure an...