Abstract
We consider the problem of allocating finitely many units of an indivisible good among a group of agents when each agent receives at most one unit of the good and pays a non-negative price. For example, imagine that a government allocates a fixed number of licenses to private firms, or that it distributes equally divided lands to households. Anonymity in welfare is a condition of impartiality in the sense that it requires allocation rules to treat agents equally in welfare terms from the viewpoint of agents who are ignorant of their own valuations or identities. We show that the Vickrey allocation rule is the unique allocation rule satisfying strategy-proofness, anonymity in welfare, and individual rationality.
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Acknowledgments
Ashlagi thanks Ron Lavi, Dov Monderer and Moshe Tennenholtz for helpful discussions. Serizawa is most thankful to Professor William Thomson for his detailed and helpful comments. Serizawa is also very thankful to the editor and two anonymous referee for reading the article thoroughly and their detailed comments. He benefitted from the discussion with the participants of the Eighth International Meeting of Social Choice and Welfare, July 2006 at Istanbul BİLGİ University.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Ashlagi, I., Serizawa, S. Characterizing Vickrey allocation rule by anonymity. Soc Choice Welf 38, 531–542 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-011-0535-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-011-0535-4