In this paper we axiomatically characterize two recursive procedures for defining a social group. The first procedure starts with the set of all individuals who are defined by everyone in the society as group members, while the starting point of the second procedure is the set of all individuals...

Equal treatment for the present and the future was required in two axioms for sustainable development introduced by the author. This article shows that the two axioms are equivalent to awareness of physical limits in the long run future. We prove that two optimization problems are equivalent:...

Discounted utilitarianism treats generations unequally and leads to seemingly unappealing consequences in some models of economic growth. Instead, this paper presents and applies sustainable discounted utilitarianism (SDU). SDU respects the interests of future generations and resolves...

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third...

We consider the problem of fairly allocating one indivisible object when monetary transfers are possible, and examine the existence of Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms to solve the problem. We propose a mechanism that satisfies envy-freeness, budget balancedness, and Bayesian incentive...

This paper studies the problem of fairly allocating an amount of a divisible resource when preferences are single-peaked. We characterize the class of envy-free and peak-only rules and show that the class forms a complete lattice with respect to a dominance relation. We also pin down the...

This paper considers the object allocation problem introduced by Shapley and Scarf (1974). We study secure implementation (Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2007), that is, double implementation in dominant strategy and Nash equilibria. We prove that (i) an individually rational solution is...

We present an axiomatic approach to the reallocation of water rights among economic sectors. Reallocation may be appropriate when the current schedule of water allocation is considered unfair. Our proposed approach is based on the combination of initial water rights, sectors' claims to water,...

We analyse the redistribution of a resource among agents who have claims to the resource and who are ordered linearly. A well known example of this particular situation is the river sharing problem. We exploit the linear order of agents to transform the river sharing problem to a sequence of...

This paper studies the application of the notion of secure implementation (Cason, Saijo, Sj¨ostr¨om, and Yamato, 2006; Saijo, Sj¨ostr¨om, and Yamato, 2007) to the problem of allocating indivisible objects with monetary transfers. We propose a new domain-richness condition, termed as minimal...