Intensity-Efficient Allocations

Georgios Gerasimou

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper proposes a refinement of Pareto-efficient allocations for situations where, in addition to having ordinal preferences, agents also have ordinal intensities: they can make comparisons such as "I prefer a to b more than I prefer c to d", without necessarily being able to quantify them. A rank-based criterion for interpersonal comparisons of such ordinal intensities is introduced for this new analytical environment. Building on this, an allocation is defined to be intensity-efficient if it is Pareto-efficient with respect to the agents' preferences and also such that when another Pareto-efficient allocation assigns the same pairs of items to the same pairs of agents but in a "flipped" way, the former allocation assigns the commonly preferred item in every such pair to the agent who prefers it more. Conditions are established under which such Pareto-refining allocations exist. The potential usefulness of this theory in matching problems is illustrated with a quadratic-time extension of the Random Priority (RP) algorithm that returns an allocation which intensity-dominates RP's Pareto-efficient one.

Date: 2020-11, Revised 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-upt
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2011.04306

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