A new ex-ante efficiency criterion and implications for the probabilistic serial mechanism

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dogan, Battal; Dogan, Serhat; Yildiz, Kemal
• 署名单位: University of Lausanne; Ihsan Dogramaci Bilkent University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2018.01.011
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 178-200
• 关键词: Ex-ante efficiency; Probabilistic assignment; fairness; probabilistic serial mechanism

摘要

We introduce and analyze an efficiency criterion for probabilistic assignment of objects, when only ordinal preference information is available. This efficiency criterion is based on the following domination relation: a probabilistic assignment dominates another assignment if it is ex-ante efficient for a strictly larger set of utility profiles consistent with the ordinal preferences. We provide a simple characterization of this domination relation. We revisit an extensively studied assignment mechanism, the Probabilistic Serial mechanism (Bogomolnaia and Moulin, 2001), which always chooses a fair assignment. We show that the Probabilistic Serial assignment may be dominated by another fair assignment. We provide conditions under which the serial assignment is undominated among fair assignments. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.