This paper explores the dynamics of nation-building policies and the conditions under which a state can promote a shared national identity on its territory. A forward-looking central government that internalizes identity dynamics shapes them by choosing the level of state centralization....

For division problems with single-peaked preferences, we show that all sequential allotment rules, a large subfamily of strategy-proof and efficient rules, are also obviously strategy-proof. Although obvious strategy-proofness is in general more restrictive than strategy-proofness, this is not...

We study ex post implementation in collective decision problems where monetary transfers cannot be used. We find that deterministic ex post implementation is impossible if the underlying environment is neither almost an environment with private values nor almost one with common values. Thus,...

A mechanism guarantees a certain welfare level to its agents, if each of them can secure that level against unanimously adversarial others. How high can such a guarantee be, and what type of mechanism achieves it? In the n-person probabilistic voting/bargaining model with p deterministic...

Theorem 1 in Bhargava, Mohit et al. (2015) provides a necessary condition for a social choice function to be LOBIC with respect to a belief system satisfying top-set (TS) correlation. In this paper, we provide a counter example to that theorem and consequently provide a new necessary condition...

In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents have heterogeneous time preferences that are interpersonally noncomparable. We first show that, even if all agents share the same time preferences, there is a conflict between the axioms of Pareto principle, time...

We propose a class of decisive collective choice rules that rely on a linear ordering to partition the majority relation into two acyclic relations. The first of these relations is used to pare down the set of the feasible alternatives into a shortlist while the second is used to make a final...

We consider dynamic processes of coalition formation in which a principal bargains sequentially with a group of agents. This problem is at the core of a variety of applications in economics, including lobbying, exclusive deals, and acquisition of complementary patents. In this context, we study...

Gibbard and Satterthwaite have shown that the only single-valued social choice functions (SCFs) that satisfy non-imposition (i.e., the function's range coincides with its codomain) and strategyproofness (i.e., voters are never better off by misrepresenting their preferences) are dictatorships....

In this paper, we show that in pure exchange economies where the number of goods equals or exceeds the number of agents, any Pareto-efficient and strategy-proof allocation mechanism always allocates the total endowment to some single agent even if the receivers vary.