In a market with indivisibilities, Roth and Postlewaite (1977) show that the (weak) core can suffer from instability problems, in the sense that groups of individuals might upset the equilibrium by recontracting among themselves. By contrast, the strong core is stable. Following the seminal...

We show that a social planner who seeks to allocate a given sum in order to reduce efficiently the social stress of a population, as measured by the aggregate relative deprivation of the population, pursues a disbursement procedure that is identical to the procedure adhered to by a Rawlsian...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Support for redistribution may also be affected by altruistic and egalitarian preferences, but knowledge about the distribution of these preferences in the broader population and...

We introduce the constrained egalitarian surplus-sharing rule fCE, which distributes an amount of a divisible resource so that the poorer agents' resulting payoffs become equal but not larger than any remaining agent's status quo payoff. We show that fCE is characterized by Pareto optimality,...

Wages and employment are too low in a monopsony. Furthermore, a minimum wage or a subsidy may raise employment up to its first-best level. First, we analyze whether these important predictions still hold if workers compare their income to that of a reference group. Second, we show that the...

A recent literature points to individuals having preferences for autonomy. Autonomy includes an individual's ability to choose a course of actions that meaning-fully affects his or her outcomes as well as an individual enjoying a certain degree of non-interference from others. In this paper we...