Jorge Alcalde-Unzu

Exchange of indivisible goods and indifferences: The Top Trading Absorbing Sets mechanisms

There is a wide range of economic problems involving the exchange of indivisible goods without monetary transfers, starting from the housing market model of the seminal paper of Shapley and Scarf [10] and including other problems like the kidney exchange or the school choice problems. For many of these models, the classical solution is the application of an algorithm/mechanism called Top Trading Cycles, attributed to David Gale, which satisfies good properties for the case of strict preferences. In this paper, we propose a family of mechanisms, called Top Trading Absorbing Sets mechanisms, that generalizes the Top Trading Cycles for the general case in which individuals can report indifferences, and preserves all its desirable properties.

Measuring the cohesiveness of preferences: an axiomatic analysis

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 introduction of some additional properties isolates a one-parameter subfamily. This parameter evaluates the effect on the cohesiveness if one individual changes his ranking on a single pair of objects, as a function of how many of the remaining individuals in the group rank the first object over the second and vice versa. Finally, we characterize the focal measures of this subfamily separately showing that they coincide with measures constructed using two, at first sight, totally different approaches suggested in the literature.

Cross-country disparities in health-care expenditure: a factor decomposition

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 Theils second measure of inequality for decomposing cross-country disparities in per capita health-care expenditure into the contributions of various factors: health-care expenditure expressed as a share of GDP, labour productivity, employment rate, activity rate and the ratio of working-age population to total population. Our results show that cross-country differences in the share of GDP devoted to health-care expenditure and labour productivity are the main determinants of the level of dispersion in per capita health-care expenditure. On the contrary, existing disparities in the remaining explanatory factors considered play a less relevant role in this context. In any event, the analysis performed reveals that the overall inequality in per capita health-care expenditure decreased throughout the study period. This was due to the process of international convergence observed in most of the factors used to break down the level of per capita health-care expenditure.

Some remarks on ranking opportunity sets and Arrow impossibility theorems: correspondence results

Abstract 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. Basically, we find that one of the axioms that the authors provide is not in all cases satisfied for the Utilitarian rules. In this paper, we discuss this issue before proposing an alternative characterization which preserves the spirit of the original authors.

On ranking opportunity distributions

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 perspectives of the notion of advantage (better opportunity set) and we provide some axioms that might be defended under such extreme positions. For any of these two different perspectives, we characterize the families of rankings which satisfy the core axioms and the group of axioms corresponding to that view. These characterizations will prove insightful to better understand most of the criteria already introduced in the literature, which are part of the families we study.

An Evolutionary Model of Prenatal and Postnatal Discrimination Against Females

Discrimination of born and unborn females is a well documented phenomenon in countries such as India, China, Taiwan or Korea. Empirical studies provide support for both an additive and a substitutive relationship between prenatal and postnatal discriminatory practices against females. We introduce a theoretical evolutionary model that endogenizes the preference for sons and, as a result, can explain why one or the other type of relationship emerges in a society.

Uncertainty with Ordinal Likelihood Information

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 states and outcomes; and the set-based approach, which ignores such information, and solves certain difficulties arising from the state space-based approach. Kelsey (Int Econ Rev 34:297–308, 1993) incorporates into a state space-based framework the assumption that the agent has ordinal information about the likelihood of the states. This paper incorporates this same assumption into a set-based framework, thus filling a theoretical gap in the literature. Compared to the set-based models of choice under complete uncertainty we introduce the information about the ordinal likelihood of the outcomes while, compared to Kelsey’s approach, we incorporate the advantages of describing uncertainty environments from the set-based perspective. We present an axiomatic study that includes adaptations of some of the axioms found in the related literature and we characterize some rules featuring different combinations of information about the ordinal likelihood of the outcomes and information about their desirability.