Exchange of indivisible goods and indifferences: The Top Trading Absorbing Sets mechanisms

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Alcalde-Unzu, Jorge; Molis, Elena
• 署名单位: University of Granada; Universidad Publica de Navarra
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2010.12.005
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 1-16
• 关键词: Housing market; Indifferences; top trading cycles; Absorbing sets

摘要

There is a wide range of economic problems that involve the exchange of indivisible goods with no monetary transfers, starting from the housing market model of the seminal paper by Shapley and Scarf (1974) to problems such as the kidney exchange or the school choice problem. The classical solution to many of these models is to apply a mechanism called Top Trading Cycles, attributed to David Gale, which satisfies good properties for the case of strict preferences. In this paper, we propose a family of mechanisms, called Top Trading Absorbing Sets mechanisms, which generalize the Top Trading Cycles to the general case in which individuals are allowed to report indifferences, while preserving a maximal possible set of its desirable properties. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.