In two-sided matching problems, we consider “natural” changes in preferences of agents in which only the rankings of current partners are enhanced. We introduce two desirable properties of matching rules under such rank-enhancements of partners. One property requires that an agent who...

We introduce the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of welfare (living standards) for individuals and populations of possibly different sizes and...

This paper considers two distinct procedures to lexicographically compose multiple criteria for social or individual decision making. The first procedure composes M binary relations into one, and then selects its maximal elements. The second procedure first selects the set of maximal elements of...

We study how to evaluate allocations independently of individual preferences over unavailable commodities. We prove impossibility results that suggest that such evaluations encounter serious difficulties. This is related to the well known problem of performing international comparisons of...

The authors study fair allocation in economies with indivisible goods. They look for subsolutions of the no-envy solution satisfying the property of consistency which says that the desirability of an allocation for some economy is unaffected by the departure of some of the agents with their...