Recent research shows that the merger of economies increases aggregate stress. This paper shows that there is no income distribution policy which will ensure that the wellbeing of the individuals belonging to merging economies does not fall below their pre-merger level.

Recent research shows that the merger of economies increases aggregate stress. This paper shows that there is no income distribution policy which will ensure that the wellbeing of the individuals belonging to merging economies does not fall below their pre-merger level.

In this paper we consider the exogenous indifference classes model of Barberá and Ehlers (2011) and Sato (2009) and analyze further the relationship between the structure of indifference classes across agents and dictatorship results. The key to our approach is the pairwise partition graph. We...

The most widely used economic models of social preferences are specified only for certain outcomes. There are two obvious methods of extending them to lotteries. If we do so by expected utility theory, so that the independence axiom is satisfied, our results imply that the resulting preferences...

A model widely used for decisions which have a public interest element is delegation of parliamentary authority to a bureaucratic agency, within the confines of a legislative framework which directs the relevant agents how social welfare should be maximised within the context of the issue at...

We explore the frontier between possibility and impossibility results by analyzing different combinations of "pro-socialness" and "consistency" conditions. This exercise delivers stronger versions of four classical impossibility theorems, and offers a thorough understanding of connections among...

We study the assignment of objects to people via lotteries. We consider the implementation of solutions that are based only on ordinal preferences over the objects. There are three natural ways of comparing lotteries, each of which corresponds to a different notion of Nash equilibrium. For each...

In this paper, virtual implementation is restricted so that only a socially optimal outcome or some fixed outcome (a status quo) can be delivered on the equilibrium path. Under such a restriction, any unanimous and implementable social choice function is almost-dictatorial. That is, there is an...