Arrow's celebrated theorem of social choice shows that the aggregation of individual preferences into a social ordering cannot make the ranking of any pair of alternatives depend only on individual preferences over that pair, unless the fundamental weak Pareto and nondictatorship principles are...

We propose 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 social states with populations of possibly different sizes with various characteristics. The...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals' preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods....

Economic systems generate various distributions of opportunity sets for individuals to choose consumption bundles. This paper presents an axiomatic analysis on distributions of opportunity sets. We introduce several reasonable properties of distributions of opportunity sets, and characterize the...

We present a simple model of voluntary groups in a collective action problem where individuals differ in their willingness to cooperate. The heterogeneity of individuals' preferences generally yields multiple equilibrium groups with different levels of cooperation. Voluntary participation in a...

In an (n,m)-coordination game, each of the n players has two alternative strategies. A strategy generates positive payoff only if there are at least m-1 others who choose the same, where mn/2. The payoff is nondecreasing in the number of such others so that there are exactly two strict...

We investigate the equilibrium selection problem in n-person binary coordination games by means of adaptive play with mistakes (Young 1993). The size and the depth of a particular type of basins of attraction are found to be the main factors in determining the selection outcome. The main result...

We investigate the equilibrium selection problem in n-person binary coordination games by means of the adaptive play with mistakes (Young 1993). We show that whenever the difference between the deviation losses of respective equilibria is not overwhelming, the stochastic stability exhibits a...

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 rankenhancements of partners. One property requires that an agent who becomes...

In this study, a participation game in a mechanism to implement a public project is considered; in this game, agents decide simultaneously whether they will participate in the mechanism or not. We characterize the sets of participants at strict Nash equilibria, strong equilibria, and...