This work offers an analysis of cooperation dilemmas making emphasis in the role of the unequal outcomes. Increases in the benefit from leaving mutual cooperation are associated to the greed dimension, while increases in the cost from leaving mutual defection are associated to fear dimension....

We study classist societies where the middle class fight over redistribution of public funds with the marginalized and over social policies with the elites. We show that such societies are often deprived of well-defined majoritarian preferences, underscoring the importance of the party system....

Acyclicity of individual preferences is a minimal assumption in social choice theory. We replace that assumption by the direct assumption that preferences have maximal elements on a fixed agenda. We show that the core of a simple game is nonempty for all profiles of such preferences if and only...

Many real-life applications of house allocation problems are dynamic. For example, in the case of on-campus housing for college students, each year freshmen apply to move in and graduating seniors leave. Each student stays on campus for a few years only. A student is a "newcomer" in the...

This paper proposes a notion of partial Additivity in bankruptcy, -Additivity. We show that this property, together with Anonymity and Continuity, identifies the Minimal Overlap rule, introduced by O'Neill (1982).

This paper studies the problem of assigning a set of indivisible objects to a set of agents when monetary transfers are not allowed and agents reveal only ordinal preferences, but random assignments are possible. We offer two characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism, which assigns...

A new mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others. We introduce a new framework for school-choice problems and two notions of fairness in lottery design based on ex-ante...

This chapter surveys a sizable and growing literature on coalition formation. We refer to theories in which one or more groups of agents (“coalitionsâ€) deliberately get together to jointly determine within-group actions, while interacting noncooperatively across groups. The chapter...

We introduce the prediction value (PV) as a measure of players’ informational importance in probabilistic TU games. The latter combine a standard TU game and a probability distribution over the set of coalitions. Player i’s prediction value equals the difference between the conditional...

We study political distortions that emerge in situations where agents’ political power is disproportionate with respect to their economic power. We use the Shapley value to evaluate both the economic and the political power. We show that usual weighted majority voting cannot prevent political...