Some behaviors, ideas or technologies spread and become persistent in society, whereas others vanish. This paper analyzes the role of social influence in determining such distinct collective outcomes. Agents are assumed to acquire information from others through a certain sampling process that...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an...

We analyze the problem of choosing the most appropriate method for apportioning taxes in a democracy. We consider a simple model of taxation and restrict our attention to piece-wise linear tax methods, which are almost ubiquitous in advanced democracies worldwide. In spite of facing an...

We provide a general coalitional procedure that characterizes a family of rules for bankruptcy problems inspired by the Talmud.

This article studies a model of coalition formation for the joint production (and finance) of public projects, in which agents may belong to multiple coalitions. We show that, if projects are divisible, there always exists a stable (secession-proof) structure, i.e., a structure in which no...

We investigate how to extend bankruptcy rules to the more general setting in which agents' claims may refer to di erent issues. We consider two natural procedures and show that, among all bankruptcy rules, the proportional rule is the only one whose extensions according to the two procedures...

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating conflicting claims: the constrained equal awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal losses rules. We first let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium...

We investigate the implications and logical relations between progressivity (a principle of distributive justice) and merging-proofness (a strategic principle) in taxation. By means of two characterization results, we show that these two principles are intimately related, despite their different...