Visibly fair mechanisms

Inácio Guerberoff Lanari Bó, Gian Caspari and Manshu Khanna

No 25-048, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Priority-based allocation often requires eliminating justified envy, making serial dictatorship (SD) the only non-wasteful direct mechanism with that property. However, SD's outcomes can conflict with the policymaker's objectives. We introduce visible fairness, a framework where fairness is evaluated using coarser information. This is achieved by designing message spaces that strategically conceal information that could render desired allocations unfair. We characterize these mechanisms as generalizations of SD, establish conditions for strategy-proofness, and show how to implement distributional constraints. This creates a new trade-off: achieving distributional goals may require limiting preference elicitation, forgoing efficiency gains even when compatible with the constraints.

Keywords: Matching Theory; Market Design; Indirect Mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D47 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/328245/1/1937853535.pdf (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:zbw:zewdip:328245

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().