Notions of anonymity for object assignment: impossibility theorems

Hikaru Kondo ()
Additional contact information
Hikaru Kondo: Osaka University

Review of Economic Design, 2019, vol. 23, issue 3, No 2, 113-126

Abstract: Abstract We search for impartiality in the allocation of objects when monetary transfers are not possible. Our main focus is anonymity. The standard definition requires that if agents’ names are permuted, their assignments be permuted in the same way. Since no rule satisfies this definition, we introduce weaker variants, “anonymity for distinct preferences,” “pairwise-anonymity for distinct preferences,” “pairwise-anonymity for fully differentiated profiles,” and “independence of others’ permutations.” We show that for more than two agents and two objects, no rule is pairwise-anonymous for distinct preferences and Pareto-efficient (Theorem 1), no rule is pairwise-anonymous for distinct preferences and independent of others’ permutations (Theorem 2), and no rule is pairwise-anonymous for fully differentiated profiles and strategy-proof (Theorem 3).

Keywords: Impartiality; Anonymity; Indivisible goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D71 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10058-019-00223-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:reecde:v:23:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s10058-019-00223-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10058

DOI: 10.1007/s10058-019-00223-1

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Design is currently edited by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Fuhito Kojima and Tilman Börgers

More articles in Review of Economic Design from Springer, Society for Economic Design
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().