This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

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...

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...

We analyze bankruptcy problems with an indivisible object, where real owners and outside traders want to allocate an indivisible object among them with monetary compensation. The object might be a company that has gone bankrupt or a house left by a parent who has died, and so on. We show that...

We search for impartiality in the allocation of objects when monetary transfers are not possible. Our main focus is anonymity. The standard definition requires that if agents' names are permuted, their assignments should be permuted in the same way. Since no rule satisfies this definition in...

This paper considers the problem of allocating N indivisible objects among N agents according to their preferences when transfers are not allowed, and studies the tradeoff between fairness and efficiency in the class of strategy-proof mechanisms. The main finding is that for strategy-proof...

We consider the problem of allocating a single object to the agents with payments. Agents have preferences that are not necessarily quasi-linear. We characterize the class of rules satisfying pairwise strategy-proofness and non-imposition by the priority rule. Our characterization result remains...

We propose the concept of level r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level r...