Unambiguous Efficiency of Random Allocations

Eun Jeong Heo, Vikram Manjunath and Samson Alva

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: When allocating indivisible objects via lottery, planners often use ordinal mechanisms, which elicit agents' rankings of objects rather than their full preferences over lotteries. In such an ordinal informational environment, planners cannot differentiate between utility profiles that induce the same ranking of objects. We propose the criterion of unambiguous efficiency: regardless of how each agent extends their preferences over objects to lotteries, the allocation is Pareto efficient with respect to the extended preferences. We compare this with the predominant efficiency criterion used for ordinal mechanisms. As an application to mechanism design, we characterize all efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms satisfying certain regularity conditions.

Date: 2024-01, Revised 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11899 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:2401.11899

Access Statistics for this paper

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