We study the probabilistic distribution of identical successive units. We represent the allocation process as the filling of an urn with balls of different colors (one color per agent). Applications include the scheduling of homogeneous tasks among workers and allocating new workers between...

Indivisible units are produced with increasing marginal costs. Under average cost, each user pays average cost. Under random priority, users are randomly ordered (without bias) and successively offered to buy at the true marginal cost. Both average cost (AC) and random priority (RP)...

A server processes one job per unit of time and randomly schedules the jobs requested by a given set of users; each user may request a different number of jobs. Fair queuing (Shenker 1989) schedules jobs in successive round-robin fashion, where each agent receives one unit in each round until...

We compare the equity and incentive properties of three efficient solutions to a simple problem of cooperative production with binary demands for a homogeneous service, when marginal cost is either monotonically increasing or monotonically decreasing. The solutions are the familiar competitive...

Indivisible units are randomly allocated among agents with a claim/demand on the resources. The available resources fall short of the sum of individual claims. The proportional method distributes units sequentially, and the probability of receiving a unit at any step is proportional to the...

We provide a simple and intuitive set of axioms that allow for a direct and constructive proof of the Choquet Expected Utility representation for decision making under uncertainty.

This paper contains an analysis of a simple principal-agent problem illustrating possible problems that arise when the principal ascribes to the agent subjective probabilities and utilities that are implied by the subjective expected utility model but do not represent the agent's beliefs and...

The evidence on city size distribution is remarkable. In many countries it obeys a Pareto distribution. Although several explanations have been proposed for the regularity, none of them is completely convincing, and the exact economic mechanism at work remains largely a puzzle. Current...