No abstract

Harless, P. (2017) Endowment additivity and the weighted proportional rules for adjudicating conflicting claims. Economic Theory, 63(3), pp. 755-781. (doi:10.1007/s00199-016-0960-9) This is the author's final accepted version.There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/129220/ AbstractWe propose and study a new axiom, restricted endowment additivity, for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims. This axiom requires that awards be additively decomposable with respect to the endowment whenever no agent's claim is filled. For two-claimant problems, restricted endowment additivity essentially characterizes weighted extensions of the proportional rule. With additional agents, however, the axiom is satisfied by a great variety of rules. Further imposing versions of continuity and consistency, we characterize a new family of rules which generalize the proportional rule. Defined by a priority relation and a weighting function, each rule aims, as nearly as possible, to assign awards within each priority class in proportion to these weights. We also identify important subfamilies and obtain new characterizations of the constrained equal awards and proportional rules based on restricted endowment additivity.Keywords: claims problem, restricted endowment additivity, weighted proportional rule, priority-augmented weighted proportional rule.JEL Classification Numbers: D63, D70, D71. * Address: Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA; e-mail: patrick.harless@rochester.edu. I thank Karol Flores-Szwagrzak and Juan Moreno-Ternero, and three anonymous referees for comments. I am grateful to William Thomson for comments, encouragement, and guidance.

Individuals form preferences through search, interviews, discussion, and investigation. In a stylized object allocation model, we characterize the equilibrium learning strategies induced by different allocation rules and trace their welfare consequences. Our analysis reveals that top trading cycles rules dominate serial priority rules under inequality-averse measures of social welfare. * Manuscript . 2 Our approach departs from standard practice of the literature on object allocation and moves toward standard practice of the mechanism design literature where information acquisition has become de rigueur (e.g., Bergemann and Välimäki, 2002). 557 C (2018) by the

In his book, The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market, Robert Sugden says that people should be left alone to do what they want. We interpret his reasons for saying so and try to unify them. The unification uses simple economic models. When we fail to unify, we explain why. Open problems emerge. If Sugden’s passion for his subject won’t motivate the reader to pursue these problems, what will? (JEL C71, C72, D60, D71, D72, I31)

No abstract