We consider the problem of assigning agents to slots on a line, where only one agent can be served at a slot and each agent prefers to be served as close as possible to his target. Our focus is on utilitarian methods, i.e., those that minimize the total gap between targets and assigned slots. We...

The paper addresses intergenerational and intragenerational equity in an overlapping generation economy. We aim at defining an egalitarian distribution of a constant stream of resources, when preferences are ordinal and non-comparable. We establish the impossibility of efficiently distributing...

One must allocate a finite set of indivisible goods among two agents without monetary compensation. We impose Pareto-efficiency, anonymity, a weak notion of no-envy, a welfare lower bound based on each agent’s ranking of the sets of goods, and a monotonicity property relative to changes in...

There exist congenital diseases that reduce newborns' potential opportunities. This reduction is sometimes alleviated if the congenital disease is early detected thanks to a newborn screening program. We propose an outcome measurement of newborn screening programs based on the opportunity gains...

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growth rate of real per-capita income, say 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Offce of Management and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small policy...

Current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines use the interest rate as a basis for the discount rate, and have nothing to say about an intergenerationally fair discount rate. We derive this discount rate by differentiating a social welfare function with respect to perturbations in...

In this paper, we provide a characterization of interim inefficiency in stochastic economies ofoverlapping generations under possibly sequentially incomplete markets. With respect to the established body of results in the literature, we remove the hypothesis of two-period horizons,by considering...

There is a wide consensus among international institutions and national governments in favor of compact (i.e. densely populated) cities as a way to improve the ecological performance of the transport system. Indeed, when both the intercity and intra-urban distributions of activities are given, a...

In this paper we study the optimal growth path and its decentralization in a two-sector overlapping- generations model with pollution. One sector (power generation) is polluting and the other (final good) is not. Pollution is regulated by tradable emission permits. The issue is whether the...

In this paper, we study a pure exchange economy with idiosyncratic uncertainty, hidden action and multiple consumption goods.We consider two different market structures: contingent markets on the one hand, and financial and spot markets on the otherhand. We propose a competitive equilibrium...