Disputed lands

Dall'Aglio, Marco and Fabio Maccheroni

Games and Economic Behavior, 2009, vol. 66, issue 1, pages 57-77

Abstract: In this paper we consider the classical problem of dividing a land among many agents so that everybody is satisfied with the parcel she receives. In the literature, it is usually assumed that all the agents are endowed with cardinally comparable, additive, and monotone utility functions. In many economic and political situations violations of these assumptions may arise. We show how a family of cardinally comparable utility functions can be obtained starting directly from the agents' preferences, and how a fair division of the land is feasible, without additivity or monotonicity requirements. Moreover, if the land to be divided can be modeled as a finite dimensional simplex, it is possible to obtain envy free (and a fortiori fair) divisions of it into subsimplexes. The main tool is an extension of a representation theorem of Gilboa and Schmeidler [Gilboa, I., Schmeidler, D., 1989, Maxmin expected utility with non-unique prior. J. Math. Econ. 18, 141-153].

Keywords: Fair; division; Envy; Preference; representation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:66:y:2009:i:1:p:57-77

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