Making Serial Dictatorships Fair

Adam Hamdan

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: In priority-based matching, serial dictatorship (SD) is simple, strategyproof, and Pareto efficient, but not free of justified envy (i.e. fair). This paper studies how to fairly order agents in SD as a function of their priorities. I show that if preferences are identical across agents and uniformly distributed, and objects have unit capacities, the serial order that minimizes the expected number of justified envy cases is the Kemeny ranking of agents' priorities. If any of these assumptions -- identical preferences, uniformly distributed preferences, or unit capacities -- is relaxed, the optimal SD follows a weighted Kemeny ranking. Broadly, these results demonstrate how insights from social choice theory can inform the design of practical matching mechanisms.

Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05660 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2603.05660

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().