On characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism involving incentive and invariance properties

Onur Kesten, Morimitsu Kurino and Utku Unver

Mathematical Social Sciences, 2017, vol. 90, issue C, 56-62

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of assigning n indivisible objects to n agents when each agent consumes one object and monetary transfers are not allowed. Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001) proved that for n=3, the probabilistic serial mechanism is characterized by the three axioms of ordinal efficiency, envy-freeness, and weak strategy-proofness. We show that this characterization does not extend to problems of arbitrary size; in particular, it does not hold for any n≥5. A number of general characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism have been obtained in the recent literature by replacing weak strategy-proofness with various invariance axioms while retaining ordinal efficiency and envy-freeness. We show that weak strategy-proofness is in fact logically independent of all invariance axioms used in these characterizations.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165489616301883
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:matsoc:v:90:y:2017:i:c:p:56-62

DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2016.11.005

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Social Sciences is currently edited by J.-F. Laslier

More articles in Mathematical Social Sciences from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().