Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268274 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
WZB Discussion Paper No. SP II 2022-208
Publisher: 
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Berlin
Abstract: 
We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity - i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the top, then each agent shall receive his most-preferred object with probability of at least q - we show that a mechanism satisfying strategy-proofness, envy-freeness and ex-post weak non-wastefulness can be q-unanimous only for q È 2/n (where n is the number of agents). To demonstrate that this bound is tight, we introduce a new mechanism, Random-Dictatorship-cum-Equal-Division (RDcED), and show that it achieves this maximal bound when all objects are acceptable. In addition, for three agents, RDcED is characterized by the first three properties and ex-post weak efficiency. If objects may be unacceptable, strategy-proofness and envy-freeness are jointly incompatible even with ex-post weak non-wastefulness.
Subjects: 
random assignment
strategy-proofness
envy-freeness
q-unanimity
JEL: 
D63
D70
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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