Markovian assignment rules

Francis Bloch and David Cantala ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2013, vol. 40, issue 1, 25 pages

Abstract: We analyze dynamic assignment problems where agents successively receive different objects (positions, offices, etc.). A finite set of n vertically differentiated indivisible objects are assigned to n agents who live n periods. At each period, a new agent enters society, and the oldest agent retires, leaving his object to be reassigned. We define independent assignment rules (where the assignment of an object to an agent is independent of the way other objects are allocated to other agents), efficient assignment rules (where there does not exist another assignment rule with larger expected surplus), and fair assignment rules (where agents experiencing the same circumstances have identical histories in the long run). When agents are homogenous, we characterize efficient, independent and fair rules as generalizations of the seniority rule. When agents draw their types at random, we prove that independence and efficiency are incompatible, and that efficient and fair rules only exist when there are two types of agents. We characterize two simple rules (type-rank and type-seniority) which satisfy both efficiency and fairness criteria in dichotomous settings. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-011-0566-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Markovian assignment rules (2013)
Working Paper: Markovian assignment rules (2013)
Working Paper: Markovian assignment rules (2013)
Working Paper: Markovian assignment rules (2010)
Working Paper: Markovian assignment rules (2008)
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:spr:sochwe:v:40:y:2013:i:1:p:1-25

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-011-0566-x

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().