 When is the probabilistic serial assignment uniquely efficient and envy-free?Wonki Cho () Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2016, vol. 66, issue C, 14-25 Abstract: We study the problem of allocating objects using lotteries. For each economy, the serial assignment, the assignment selected by the (probabilistic) serial rule, is sd-efficient and sd-envy-free (“sd” stands for stochastic dominance) but in general, it is not the only such assignment. Our question is when the uniqueness also holds. First, we provide a necessary condition for uniqueness, termed top-objects divisibility. Exploiting the structure revealed by top-objects divisibility, we then provide two sufficient conditions: preference richness and recursive decomposability. Existing sufficient conditions are restrictive in that they are satisfied only if there are sufficiently many agents relative to the number of objects; and that they only focus on preferences, ignoring other aspects of the problem that are also relevant to uniqueness. Our conditions overcome these limitations and can explain uniqueness for a wide range of economies. Keywords: Probabilistic serial assignment; sd-efficiency; sd-no-envy; Top-objects divisibility; Preference richness; Recursive decomposability (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:mateco:v:66:y:2016:i:c:p:14-25 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2016.07.001 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Mathematical Economics is currently edited by Atsushi (A.) Kajii More articles in Journal of Mathematical Economics from Elsevier |
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