TY - JOUR
T1 - On characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism involving incentive and invariance properties
AU - Kesten, Onur
AU - Kurino, Morimitsu
AU - Ünver, M. Utku
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank three anonymous referees and participants at Duke ?Roth?Sotomayor: 20 Years After? Conference, CORE, Kyoto, Maastricht, Osaka, and Tsukuba for comments. Kurino acknowledges the financial support from JSPS KAKENHI Grant number 15K13002. ?nver acknowledges the research support of Microsoft Research Lab, New England.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2017/11
Y1 - 2017/11
N2 - This paper studies the problem of assigning n indivisible objects to n agents when each agent consumes one object and monetary transfers are not allowed. Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001) proved that for n=3, the probabilistic serial mechanism is characterized by the three axioms of ordinal efficiency, envy-freeness, and weak strategy-proofness. We show that this characterization does not extend to problems of arbitrary size; in particular, it does not hold for any n≥5. A number of general characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism have been obtained in the recent literature by replacing weak strategy-proofness with various invariance axioms while retaining ordinal efficiency and envy-freeness. We show that weak strategy-proofness is in fact logically independent of all invariance axioms used in these characterizations.
AB - This paper studies the problem of assigning n indivisible objects to n agents when each agent consumes one object and monetary transfers are not allowed. Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001) proved that for n=3, the probabilistic serial mechanism is characterized by the three axioms of ordinal efficiency, envy-freeness, and weak strategy-proofness. We show that this characterization does not extend to problems of arbitrary size; in particular, it does not hold for any n≥5. A number of general characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism have been obtained in the recent literature by replacing weak strategy-proofness with various invariance axioms while retaining ordinal efficiency and envy-freeness. We show that weak strategy-proofness is in fact logically independent of all invariance axioms used in these characterizations.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2016.11.005
DO - 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2016.11.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85009288388
VL - 90
SP - 56
EP - 62
JO - Mathematical Social Sciences
JF - Mathematical Social Sciences
SN - 0165-4896
ER -