Chapter Twenty-One - Fair Allocation Rules

William Thomson

Chapter 21 in Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, 2011, vol. 2, pp 393-506 from Elsevier

Abstract: We review the theory of fairness as it pertains to concretely specified problems of resource allocations. We present punctual notions designed to evaluate how well individuals, or groups, are treated in relation to one another: no-envy, egalitarian-equivalence, individual and collective lower or upper bounds on welfare, notions of equal or equivalent opportunities, as well as various families extending these notions. We also introduce relational notions specifying how allocation rules should respond to changes in resources (resource monotonicity), technologies (technology monotonicity), preferences (welfare domination under preference replacement), and population (population monotonicity, consistency, converse consistency). We investigate the implications of these properties, in various combinations, in the context of various models: the “classical” problem of dividing an unproduced bundle, economies with production, economies with public goods, economies with single-peaked preferences, economies with indivisible goods, and economies in which the dividend is a non-homogeneous continuum. We consider economies in which resources are owned collectively, economies in which they are owned privately, and economies in which ownership is mixed. We offer a number of characterizations of particular allocation rules.

Keywords: fairness; no-envy; egalitarian-equivalence; lower bounds on welfares; upper bounds on welfare; equal opportunities; equivalent opportunities; resource monotonicity; technology monotonicity; preference domination under preference replacement; population monotonicity; consistency; converse consistency; classical problem of fair division; production economies; public goods; single-peaked preferences; indivisible goods; non-homogeneous continuum (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
ISBN: 978-0-444-82914-6
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

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