This project supports the mentoring of graduate students and research in the axiomatic and strategic analysis of resource allocation. The investigator is the leader in this subfield of economics. The goal of his research is to rigorously derive from fundamental axioms rules of social choice that have desirable normative and strategic properties. The alternatives and preferences considered are the kinds encountered in standard economic problems. The research is motivated by concrete economic problems and as a consequence can have considerable practical significance.
This project explores rules of fair division that can not be manipulated by borrowing and lending among the agents. Borrowing-proofness says that agents should never gain by borrowing resources. The project also formulates the ideas of immunity to manipulation through withdrawal (not showing up in exchange for a kickback), for standard problems and for fair division, or through pre-delivery, or through merging endowments, and through splitting endowments. These forms of strategic behavior have not been systematically studied before. Their analysis will require new techniques, especially because they cannot be verified on the basis of local information only. Thus, marginal analysis cannot be invoked.
Broader Impacts: Agents behave strategically whenever they can, and understanding how they can be prevented from doing so has to be part of the design of allocation rules. Manipulation through misrepresenting the resources agents control is an important way in which they attempt to obtain outcomes they prefer. There are many applications of these fair allocation rules. This project studies these properties in queueing, scheduling, allocating private goods, divisible or not, when monetary compensations are possible or when they are not; allocating a good when preferences are single-peaked; and choosing public goods. In each case, the compatibility of the strategic objective with efficiency and basic distributional requirements are studied.
