Preference revelation games and strong cores of allocation problems with indivisibilities

This paper studies the incentive compatibility of solutions to generalized indivisible good allocation problems introduced by Sönmez (1999), which contain the well-known marriage problems (Gale and Shapley, 1962) and the housing markets (Shapley and Scarf, 1974) as special cases. In particular, I consider the vulnerability to manipulation of solutions that are individually rational and Pareto optimal. By the results of Sönmez (1999) and Takamiya (2003), any individually rational and Pareto optimal solution is strategy-proof if and only if the strong core correspondence is essentially single-valued, and the solution is a strong core selection. Given this fact, this paper examines the equilibrium outcomes of the preference revelation games when the strong core correspondence is not necessarily essentially single-valued. I show that for the preference revelation games induced by any solution which is individually rational and Pareto optimal, the set of strict strong Nash equilibrium outcomes coincides with the strong core. This generalizes one of the results by Shin and Suh (1996) obtained in the context of the marriage probelms. Further, I examine the other preceding results proved for the marriage problems (Alcalde, 1996; Shin and Suh, 1996; Sönmez, 1997) to find that none of those results are generalized to the general model.