American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Strategyproof Choice of Social Acts
American Economic Review
vol. 110,
no. 2, February 2020
(pp. 596–627)
Abstract
We model uncertain social prospects as acts mapping states of nature to (social) outcomes. A social choice function (or SCF) assigns an act to each profile of subjective expected utility preferences over acts. An SCF is strategyproof if no agent ever has an incentive to misrepresent her beliefs about the states of nature or her valuation of the outcomes. It is unanimous if it picks the feasible act that all agents find best whenever such an act exists. We offer a characterization of the class of strategyproof and unanimous SCFs in two settings. In the setting where all acts are feasible, the chosen act must yield the favorite outcome of some (possibly different) agent in every state of nature. The set of states in which an agent's favorite outcome is selected may vary with the reported belief profile; it is the union of all states assigned to her by a collection of constant, bilaterally dictatorial, or bilaterally consensual assignment rules. In a setting where each state of nature defines a possibly different subset of available outcomes, bilaterally dictatorial or consensual rules can only be used to assign control rights over states characterized by identical sets of available outcomes.Citation
Bahel, Eric, and Yves Sprumont. 2020. "Strategyproof Choice of Social Acts." American Economic Review, 110 (2): 596–627. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20171553Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D71 Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
- D81 Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
- R53 Public Facility Location Analysis; Public Investment and Capital Stock