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...

The Borda Count (BC) is a positional voting procedure fairly often applied in nonpolitical choice settings. It has a usual mixture of good and bad theoretical properties. It is monotonic and consistent and excludes the election of an eventual Condorcet loser. It, however, does not necessarily...

We derive a necessary and a sufficient condition for Nash implementation with a procedurally fair mechanism. Our result has a nice analogue with the path-braking result of Maskin [Nash equilibrium and welfare optimality, Rev. Econ. Stud. 66 (1999) 23-38.], and therefore, it allows us to give a...

We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a proposed innovation on behalf of 'society'. Each expert's signal about the innovation's quality is generated by the available evidence and the best practices of the experts'...

Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the aggregation of information in committees. We analyze unique data from the decision-making process of hiring committees within a large private company. In the hiring process, committee members first conduct independent one-to-one interviews and give...

EU declares to provide support for the rural and poor regions of its member states. However, recent research shows that past EU budget allocations (in EU-15) can be attributed to measures of the distribution of voting power in the Council of Ministers deciding on the bulk of EU spending. A...

The member states have self-interested objectives and they use their voting power in the Council of Ministers (CM) to maximize their shares from the EU budget, whereas European Parliament (EP) uses its power to support benevolent objectives and equality between member states. Given the current...

It is a constant topic of debate how the European Union (EU) spends the money it collects from its member states. This paper supports the idea that the EU budget battle involves one-shot games that have persistent impacts on the budget allocations. In one way or the other, the member states are...

Techniques based on using principal eigenvectors of matrices representing binary relations of sets of alternatives are commonly used in social sciences, bibliometrics, and web search engines. In most applications the binary relations can be represented by a directed graph and the question of...