Jorge Alcalde-Unzu

Universidad Pública de Navarra | UPNA · Department of Economics

The theoretical literature on public school choice proposes centralized mechanisms that assign children to schools on the basis of parents’ preferences and the priorities children have for different schools. The related experimental literature analyzes in detail how various mechanisms fare in terms of welfare and stability of the resulting matching...

We establish that all strategy-proof social choice rules in strict preference domains follow necessarily a two-step procedure. In the first step, agents are asked to reveal some specific information about their preferences. Afterwards, a subrule that is dictatorial or strategy-proof of range 2 must be applied, and the selected subrule may differ de...

We analyze the problem of locating a public facility in a domain of single-peaked and single-dipped preferences when the social planner knows the type of preference (single-peaked or single-dipped) of each agent. Our main result characterizes all strategy-proof rules and shows that they can be decomposed into two steps. In the first step, the agent...

We consider the problem of cleaning a transboundary river, proposed by Ni and Wang (Games Econ Behav 60:176–186, 2007). A river is modeled as a segment divided into subsegments, each occupied by one region, from upstream to downstream. The waste is transferred from one region to the next at some rate. Since this transfer rate may be unknown, the so...

Consider the problem of locating a public facility taking into account the agents’ preferences. To construct strategy-proof social choice rules, we propose a new preference domain that allows agents to have any single-peaked or any single-dipped preference on the location of the facility such that the peak/dip of the preference is in her own locati...

The closeness (or cohesiveness) of preferences in a preference profile has mainly been measured by aggregating the distances between each pair of preferences. We argue in this paper that some important information is lost in this process and we opt for considering the profile as a whole when constructing such a measure. With this idea in mind, we p...

The cleaning up of waste present in transboundary rivers, which requires the cooperation of different authorities, is a problematic issue, especially when responsibility for the discharge of the waste is not well-defined. Following Ni and Wang (2007) we assume that a river is a segment divided into several regions from upstream to downstream. We sh...

We study axiomatically situations in which the society agrees to treat voters with different characteristics distinctly. In this setting, we propose a set of six intuitive axioms and show that they jointly characterize a new class of voting procedures, called Personalized Approval Voting. According to this family, each voter has a strictly positive...

In this paper, we axiomatically study how to measure the similarity of preferences in a group of individuals. For simplicity, we refer to this as the cohesiveness. First, we provide axioms that characterize a family of linear and additive measures whose intersection is a partial ordinal criterion similar to first order stochastic dominance. The int...

We present a model that is closely related to the so-called models of choice under complete uncertainty, in which the agent has no information about the probability of the outcomes. There are two approaches within the said models: the state space-based approach, which takes into account the possible states of nature and the correspondence between s...

Rankings to evaluate opportunity distributions present in most of the literature judge a policy (change from one distribution of opportunities to another) on the basis of the changes created and, thus, independently of the original situation. This paper proposes a group of axioms capturing the idea that rankings of equality of opportunities might c...

This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage o...

There is a wide range of economic problems that involve the exchange of indivisible goods with no monetary transfers, starting from the housing market model of the seminal paper by Shapley and Scarf (1974) to problems such as the kidney exchange or the school choice problem. The classical solution to many of these models is to apply a mechanism cal...

Motivation. Human beings do not live in isolation and they have to take many decisions collectively. Examples include the election of firm representatives, the decision of where to build a new school, and the task of how to share natural resources. Equally, the satisfaction of a single individual usually depends on the performance of the group; jus...

Our results show the intimate relationship between a large group of apparently different rankings of opportunity distributions. First, we provide a set of core basic axioms that are intuitively plausible under any concern for equality or efficiency aspects. Second, we introduce two very opposed views of the problem by incorporating different perspe...

We propose a new class of voting procedures, called Size Approval Voting, according to which, the effective weight of a vote from a given individual depends on how many other candidates that individual votes for. In particular, weights are assumed to be non-negative and weakly decreasing in the number of approved candidates. Then, for a given profi...

This note investigates the sources of international differences in the levels of per capita health-care expenditure, using data on the OECD countries between 1975 and 2003. To that end, we use Theil's second measure of inequality for decomposing cross-country disparities in per capita health-care expenditure into the contributions of various factor...

The cohesion of a society depends to large extend on the degree to which its members coincide in their preferences (the consensus). This paper proposes axioms a consensus measure should satisfy from a normative point of view and characterizes first a class of linear and additive measures which fulfills an ordinal property similar to the concepts of...

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information pro...

In this note we introduce a family of functions that various theoretical results have revealed as useful mobility measures. These functions have enabled us to circumvent an impossibility result obtained by Shorrocks (1978), by adapting one of his axioms to the context of mobility as movement. A particular case belonging to this family is the Bartho...

An earlier work by Dutta and Sen provides characterizations of a set of decision rules for the ranking of opportunity sets. This paper begins by demonstrating the redundancy of one of the axioms in the said characterizations and goes on to analyze in detail one of the theorems, the Generalized Utilitarian rules theorem, which is incorrect. Basicall...

We propose two ways of how to measure the consensus of opinions within a given group of individuals. According to the first rule, the consensus is determined by calculating first, for every pair of alternatives, the dif- ferences in the support of one alternative over the other and, in a second step, by averaging the differences in the support over...