The years between Hungary’s occupation by the Red Army that concluded its traumatic involvement in the Second World War and the construction of socialist dictatorship in the country at the end of the 1940s constitute a moment of transition, a moment that is central to understanding the subsequent development of the country. For this reason the interpretation of this moment of transition has bee...

We consider discrete protocols for the classical Steinhaus cake cutting problem. Under mild technical conditions, we show that any deterministic strategy-proof protocol for two agents in the standard Robertson-Webb query model is dictatorial, that is, there is a fixed agent to which the protocol allocates the entire cake. For n > 2 agents, a similar impossibility holds, namely there always exis...

In many, if not most, elections, several different seats must be filled, so that a group of candidates, or an assembly, is selected. Typically in these elections, voters cast their ballots on a seat-by-seat basis. We show that seat-by-seat procedures are efficient or neutral only under extreme conditions. How should a voting system be judged? A time-honoured approach judges a system on the basi...

We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with dichotomous preferences and normalized von NeumannMorgenstern preferences. We are particularly interested in the well-known Random Serial Dictatorship mechanism. For dichotomous preferences, we first show that truthful, symmetric and optimal mechanisms exist if intractab...

BACKGROUND There is a health crisis in Turkmenistan similar to, but more severe than, in other Central Asian countries. This paper asks whether the health crisis in Turkmenistan is attributable to the consequences of the dictatorship under president Niyazov, who died in 2006. METHODS The basis for this paper was a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with key informants complemented ...

Pattanaik and Peleg (1986) imposed regularity, ex-post Pareto optimality and independence of irrelevant alternatives on a probabilistic voting procedure and showed that: (i) the distribution of coalitional power for decisiveness in two-alternative feasible sets is subadditive in general, but additive if the universal set has at least four alternatives; and (ii) the distribution of coalitional p...

Last time we examined a generic approach for inapproximability results based on the Unique Games Conjecture. Before, we had already shown that approximating MAX-3-LIN to within a constant factor larger than 12 is NP-hard. To do this we used a tweaked version of our dictatorship test that we came up with earlier in the semester. Last time we (re)proved that approximating MAX-3-LIN to within a co...

We propose a new set of mechanisms, which we call serial dictatorship mechanisms with reservation prices for the allocation of one indivisible good. We show that a mechanism φ satisfies minimal tradability, individual rationality, strategy-proofness, consistency, and non wasteful tie-breaking if and only if there exists a reservation price vector r and a priority ordering such that φ is a seria...

Using the 2002 World Health Survey, we examine the association between welfare state regimes, gender and mental health among 26 countries classified into seven distinct regimes: Conservative, Southeast Asian, Eastern European, Latin American, Liberal, Southern/Ex-dictatorship, and Social Democratic. A two-level hierarchical model found that the odds of experiencing a brief depressive episode in...

One of the most celebrated results in microeconomic theory is the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem (Gibbard, 1973; Satterthwaite, 1975), which states that every strategyproof and Pareto-optimal social choice function is a dictatorship. However, the theorem crucially relies on the assumption that outcomes are deterministic. Gibbard (1977) later considered social decision schemes, i.e., social choic...