A central problem in multiagent systems concerns the fair assignment of objects to agents. We initiate the study of randomized assignment rules with optional participation and investigate whether agents always benefit from participating in the assignment mechanism. Our results are largely positive, irrespective of the strategyproofness of the considered rules. In particular, random serial dicta...

Is the Pareto optimality of matching mechanisms robust to the introduction of boundedly rational behavior? To address this question I define a restrictive and a permissive notion of Pareto optimality and consider the large set of hierarchical exchange mechanisms which contains serial dictatorship as well as Gale’s top trading cycles. Fix a housing problem with boundedly rational agents and a hi...

How should we allocate a social endowment of objects among a group of agents when monetary compensation is not possible? Typical examples are the assignment of offices among faculty and the assignment of tasks among subalterns. We follow an axiomatic approach and impose two properties on rules: Pareto-efficiency and consistency. Previous research arrived at a “dictatorship” result imposing anot...

In voting theory the well-known Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem is about the manipulability of aggregators which consists of the aggregation of individual preferences expressed as a complete ordering over the set of alternatives. This paper deals with the generalization of such a theorem in a context where each individual expresses a fuzzy preference (weak) ordering. This extension is called H-ma...

The system of contract enforcement that emerged under the Soviet dictatorship included two official and one informal institutions: administrative enforcement, the system of arbitration courts, and unofficial relational contracting. Official institutions supported transactions that targeted fulfillment of the dictator’s objective. Legal contract enforcement emerged owing to the dictator, who sou...

The sale of oil and gas is one of the most important components of the Syrian economy. Unfortunately, since the discovery of these resources, the Syrian people have not benefited from the revenues earned. This study deals with the development of oil and gas production and the geographical distribution of fields, as well as production control, deterioration of production, refining and selling me...

Historically, programming languages have been—benevolent—dictators: reducing all possible semantics to specific ones offered by a few built-in language constructs. Over the years, some programming languages have freed the programmers from the restrictions to use only built-in libraries, built-in data types, and builtin type-checking rules. Even though—arguably—such freedom could lead to anarchy...