A welfarist approach to sequencing problems with incentives

We adopt a welfarist approach to study sequencing problems in a private information setup. The ”generalized minimum welfare bound” (GMWB) is a universal representation of all the specific bounds that have been previously studied in the literature. Every agent is offered a protection in the form of a minimum guarantee on their utilities. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition to identify an outcome efficient and strategy-proof mechanism that satisfies GMWB.We then characterize the entire class of mechanisms that satisfy outcome efficiency, strategy proofness and GMWB. These are termed as the class of ”relative pivotal mechanisms”. Our paper proposes relevant theoretical applications namely; ex-ante initial order, identical costs bound and expected cost bound. We also give insights on the issues of feasibility and/or budget balance.