Consistent Relations

Consistency, a natural weakening of transitivity introduced in a seminal contribution by Suzumura (1976b), has turned out to be an interesting and promising concept in a variety of areas within economic theory. This paper summarizes its recent applications and provides some new observations in welfarist social choice and in population ethics. In particular, it is shown that the conclusion of the welfarism theorem remains true if transitivity is replaced by consistency and that an impossibility result in variable-population social-choice theory turns into a possibility if transitivity is weakened to consistency.

Public Decisions: Solidarity and the Status Quo

A public decision model specifies a fixed set of alternatives A, a variable population, and a fixed set of admissible preferences over A, common to all agents. We study the implications, for any social choice function, of the principle of solidarity, in the class of all such models. The principle says that when the environment changes, all agents not responsible for the change should all be affected in the same direction: either all weakly win, or all weakly lose. We consider two formulations of this principle: population-monotonicity (Thomson, 1983); and replacement-domination (Moulin, 1987). Under weak additional requirements, but regardless of the domain of preferences considered, each of the two conditions implies (i) coalition-strategy-proofness; (ii) that the choice only depends on the set of preferences that are present in the society and not on the labels of agents, nor on the number of agents having a particular preference; (iii) that there exists a status quo point, i.e. an alternative always weakly Pareto-dominated by the alternative selected by the rule. We also prove that replacement-domination is generally at least as strong as population-monotonicity.

Solidarity in Choosing a Location on a Cycle

We study the implications of two solidarity conditions on the efficient location of a public good on a cycle, when agents have single-peaked, symmetric preferences. Both conditions require that when circumstances change, the agents not responsible for the change should all be affected in the same direction: either they all gain or they all loose. The first condition, population-monotonicity, applies to arrival or departure of one agent. The second, replacement-domination, applies to changes in the preferences of one agent. Unfortunately, no Pareto-efficient solution satisfies any of these properties. However, if agents’ preferred points are restricted to the vertices of a small regular polygon inscribed in the circle, solutions exist. We characterize them as a class of efficient priority rules.

Toward a Political Theory of Environmental Policy.

This paper makes some steps toward a formal political economy of environmental policy. Economists' quasi-unanimous preferences for sophisticated incentive regulation is reconsidered. First, we recast the question of instrument choice in the general mechanism literature and provide an incomplete contract approach to political economy. Then, in various settings, we show why constitutional constraints on the instruments of environmental policy may be desirable, even though they appear inefficient from a purely standard economic viewpoint.

Decisive Coalitions and Coherence Properties

In a seminal contribution, Hansson has demonstrated that the family of decisive coalitions associated with an Arrovian social welfare function forms an ultrafilter. If the population under consideration is infinite, his result implies the existence of nondictatorial social welfare functions. He goes on to show that if transitivity is weakened to quasi-transitivity as the coherence property imposed on a social relation, the set of decisive coalitions is a filter. We examine the structure of decisive coalitions and analogous concepts with alternative coherence properties, namely, acyclicity and Suzumura consistency, and without assuming that the social relation is complete.

Ordered Model Processes, Reference Declaration And The Economic Organization: Implications For A Balanced Scorecard Contextual Framework

Les Tableaux de Bord de la Performance ont été acclamés avec raison depuis leur introduction en 1992, mais les intellectuels continuent encore à étudier leurs aspects pragmatiques. Ce papier contribue à la littérature sur les Tableaux de Bord de la Performance, tout d’abord, en offrant une explication logique quant à leur succès et ensuite, en présentant un cadre de travail contextuel de tableaux de bord de la performance pour une structure de gestion hiérarchisée. Le cadre de travail contextuel réforme la perspective d’apprentissage et de croissance du tableau de bord de la performance (i) en effectuant la transition de référence (subjective/objective), et (ii) en reconnaissant que la Perspective d’Apprentissage et de Croissance implique avant tout une incidence de formulation stratégique d’une extra-entité. Le transfert de l’incidence (intra-entité/extra-entité) réconcilie l’évolution de la position de politique de gestion non ordonnée [Contenu: (Contenu: Contexte): Contexte] qu’est la Perspective d’Apprentissage et de Croissance Concomitante. Le cadre de travail supplante également les Perspectives des Tableaux de Bord de la Performances développés par Kaplan et Norton en ajoutant la perspective de politique sociale qui manquait. La perspective manquante implique une transition de référence objective [(position endogène, perspective exogène): (position exogène, perspective exogène)]. De tels signaux de transition [Contenu: (Contenu: Contexte): Contexte] ordonnent l’évolution de la position de politique de gestion.

Market failure, inequality and redistribution

We consider the following question: does market failure justify redistribution? We argue that the general answer to this question is no, in the sense that policies for correcting market failures do not aim at producing a "desirable" income distribution. This follows from the fact that, by construction, market failure is a deviation from "efficiency" that does not involve any notion of a desirable distribution of welfare (or income). However, there are special cases where a "corrective measure" involving redistribution can offset a market failure, so this can provide a form of efficiency- based justification for redistribution.

Ordered Conflict Resolution

Ordered conflict resolution: understanding her tenets cost Keynes his life and Arrow to live under extortionate threat. Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has conquered the Informal Capital Market Cartel’s stranglehold on academic freedom, the literature can now vindicate impossibility- resolved social choice theory in the venue of a marriage between ethics and economics; as Sen has pled need be the case. This paper introduces ordered conflict resolution and her two impossibility-resolving axioms in effecting (individual: societal) well-being transitivity.

Ordered Conflict Resolution

Ordered conflict resolution: understanding her tenets cost Keynes his life and Arrow to live under extortionate threat. Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has conquered the Informal Capital Market Cartel’s stranglehold on academic freedom, the literature can now vindicate impossibility- resolved social choice theory in the venue of a marriage between ethics and economics; as Sen has pled need be the case. This paper introduces ordered conflict resolution and her two impossibility-resolving axioms in effecting (individual: societal) well-being transitivity.

PROTECT_U: Un système communautaire pour la protection des usagers de Facebook

Article publié dans le journal « Journal of Information Security Research ». March 2012.

An axiomatic characterization of the MVSHN group fitness ordering

In order to analyze a unicellular-multicellular evolutionary transition, a multicellular organism is identified with the vector of viabilities and fecundities of its constituent cells. The Michod–Viossat–Solari–Hurand–Nedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism is a function of these cell viabilities and fecundities. The MVSHN index has been used to analyze the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during the transition to multicellularity. In this article, social choice theory is used to provide an axiomatic characterization of the group fitness ordering of vectors of cell viabilities and fecundities underlying the MVSHN index.

Las decisiones colectivas en el caso de la titulación de activos

La literatura sobre desarrollo económico y pobreza de los últimos años ha enfatizado en el tema de los derechos de propiedad, las instituciones informales y su relación con el mercado de capitales. Este trabajo busca modelar algunos aspectos de la obra del economista Hernando De Soto en el tema de la informalidad, específicamente ¿cómo es que el establecimiento de un sistema de propiedad permite a la gente elegir de entre un conjunto mayor de socios comerciales?, y ¿por qué la decisión individual costo-beneficio de expedir un títulolegal de propiedad es considerada un asunto de redes? Para modelar este problema, se utilizó un enfoque deteoría de juegos: los pagos están relacionados con la distribución de la población total entre sectores formales e informales, y surgen fenómenos de retroalimentación positiva y externalidades. Las conclusiones incluyen análisis de política para el caso de la vivienda en Colombia.

Descentralización y acceso a la educación entre 1985-1997 La evidencia en cuatro departamentos Colombianos Caldas, Caquetá, Cundinamarca y Sucre

Existen disparidades importantes entre los departamentos expresadas en el acceso a los servicios públicos y sociales, en el ingreso per cápita regional, etc. Debido a esto la Constitución de 1.991 fortaleció el proceso de descentralización y aumentó las transferencias de recursos a las regiones más pobres para disminuir las brechas de desarrollo económico y social. La descentralización genera mayor cercanía entre ciudadanos, servicios y gobierno permitiendo una mayor eficiencia en la provisión de los bienes y servicios públicos con un mayor control ciudadano. Así “La descentralización tiene sentido desde el punto de vista económico en la medida en que permite captar mejor las generalmente muy diversas necesidades y preferencias de los ciudadanos.

Allocation rules on networks

When allocating a resource, geographical and infrastructural constraints have to be taken into account. We study the problem of distributing a resource through a network from sources endowed with the resource to citizens with claims. A link between a source and an agent depicts the possibility of a transfer from the source to the agent. Given the supplies at each source, the claims of citizens, and the network, the question is how to allocate the available resources among the citizens. We consider a simple allocation problem that is free of network constraints, where the total amount can be freely distributed. The simple allocation problem is a claims problem where the total amount of claims is greater than what is available. We focus on consistent and resource monotonic rules in claims problems that satisfy equal treatment of equals. We call these rules fairness principles and we extend fairness principles to allocation rules on networks. We require that for each pair of citizens in the network, the extension is robust with respect to the fairness principle. We call this condition pairwise robustness with respect to the fairness principle. We provide an algorithm and show that each fairness principle has a unique extension which is pairwise robust with respect to the fairness principle. We give applications of the algorithm for three fairness principles: egalitarianism, proportionality and equal sacrifice.

Una Aproximación más a la relación existente entre crecimiento y desigualdad

La literatura económica ha abordado la discusión sobre el crecimiento y la equidad en distintas líneas. La necesidad de tener una sociedad más equitativa es una de las opciones y este escrito intenta aportar nuevas ideas a la discusión dando prioridad a la equidad. Para este efecto, discute, el espacio en el que se trabajará la desigualdad, las causalidades existentes frente a la relación crecimiento y equidad, y las fortalezas y debilidades de sobre los indicadores convencionalmente utilizados para su medición.