Priorities in the location of multiple public facilities

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We characterize the class of rules satisfying Pareto-efficiency, object-population monotonicity and sovereignty. Each rule in the class is a priority rule that selects locations according to a predetermined priority ordering among “interest groups”. We characterize the subclasses of priority rules that respectively satisfy anonymity, avoid the no-show paradox, strategy-proofness and population-monotonicity. In particular, we prove that a priority rule is strategy-proof if and only if it partitions the set of agents into a fixed hierarchy. Any such rule can also be viewed as a collection of generalized peak-selection median rules, that are linked across populations, in a way that we describe.