When an agent decides whether to join or not a coalition, she must consider (1) the expected power of such a coalition as well as (2) her or her position in the vertical structure within the coalition, be it a firm, a party, or a gang. We establish that there exists a positive relationship between the degree of inequality in remuneration across ranks and the number of coalitions to be formed. M...

In this paper we deal with the problem of incentive mechanism design which yields efficient allocations for general mixed ownership economies when preferences, individual endowments, and coalition patterns among individuals are unknown to the planner. We do so by doubly implementing the proportional solution for economies with any number of private sector and public sector commodities and any n...

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third class. British passengers were more likely to perish than members of other nations. This extreme event rep...

The paper discusses the sense in which the changes undergone by normative economics in the 20 century can be said to be progressive. A simple criterion is proposed to decide whether a sequence of normative theories is progressive. This criterion is put to use on the historical transition from the new welfare economics to social choice theory. The paper reconstructs this classic case, and eventu...

We analyze infinite-horizon choice functions within the setting of a simple technology. Efficiency and time consistency are characterized by stationary consumption and inheritance functions, as well as a transversality condition. In addition, we consider the equity axioms Suppes-Sen, Pigou-Dalton, and resource monotonicity. We show that Suppes-Sen and Pigou-Dalton imply that the consumption and...

We survey the literature devoted to the study of the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among agents whose preferences are single-peaked. We formulate a number of normative and strategic requirements on rules, and study their implications when imposed in various combinations. A unique rule emerges as being the best-behaved from a variety of viewpoints: the uniform rule. Key...

A theory is developed to explain all possible three-alternative (single-profile) pairwise and positional voting outcomes. This includes all preference aggregation paradoxes, cycles, conflict between the Borda and Condorcet winners, differences among positional outcomes (e.g., the plurality and antiplurality methods), and differences among procedures using these outcomes (e.g., runoffs, Kemeny's...

Classify simple games into sixteen “types” in terms of the four conventional axioms: monotonicity, properness, strongness, and nonweakness. Further classify them into sixty-four classes in terms of finiteness (existence of a finite carrier) and algorithmic computability. For each such class, we either show that it is empty or give an example of a game belonging to it. We observe that if a type ...

For infinite societies, Fishburn (1970), Kirman and Sondermann (1972), and Armstrong (1980) gave a nonconstructive proof of the existence of a social welfare function satisfying Arrow’s conditions (Unanimity, Independence, and Nondictatorship). This paper improves on their results by (i) giving a concrete example of such a function, and (ii) showing how to compute, from a description of a profi...

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