Axiomatic Characterizations of Draft Rules

Jacob Coreno and Ivan Balbuzanov

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Drafts are sequential round-robin allocation procedures for distributing heterogeneous and indivisible objects among agents subject to some priority order (e.g., allocating players' contract rights to teams in professional sports leagues). Agents report ordinal preferences over objects and bundles are partially ordered by pairwise comparison. We provide a simple characterization of draft rules: they are the only allocation rules that are respectful of a priority (RP), envy-free up to one object (EF1), non-wasteful (NW), and resource monotonic (RM). RP and EF1 are crucial for competitive balance in sports leagues. We also prove two related impossibility theorems showing that the competitive-balance axioms RP and EF1 are generally incompatible with strategy-proofness. Nevertheless, draft rules satisfy maxmin strategy-proofness. If agents may declare some objects unacceptable, then draft rules are characterized by RP, EF1, NW, and RM, in conjunction with individual rationality and truncation invariance.

Date: 2022-04, Revised 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-des, nep-mic and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.08300 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2204.08300

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().