Axiomatic characterizations of draft rules

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Coreno, Jacob; Balbuzanov, Ivan
• 署名单位: University of Lausanne; University of Melbourne
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2026.106169
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: PROFESSIONAL SPORTS; strategy-proof; Fair division; allocation; Consistency; efficient

摘要

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 apriority (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.