Quantifying Inefficiency

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gonczarowski, Yannai A., Segev, Ella
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Gonczarowski, Yannai A.
Segev, Ella
author_facet Gonczarowski, Yannai A.
Segev, Ella
contents We axiomatically define a cardinal social inefficiency function, which, given a set of alternatives and individuals' vNM preferences over the alternatives, assigns a unique number -- the social inefficiency -- to each alternative. These numbers -- and not only their order -- are uniquely defined by our axioms despite no exogenously given interpersonal comparison, outside option, or disagreement point. We interpret these numbers as per-capita losses in endogenously normalized utility. We apply our social inefficiency function to a setting in which interpersonal comparison is notoriously hard to justify -- object allocation without money -- leveraging techniques from computer science to prove an approximate-efficiency result for the Random Serial Dictatorship mechanism.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_11984
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Inefficiency
Gonczarowski, Yannai A.
Segev, Ella
Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
We axiomatically define a cardinal social inefficiency function, which, given a set of alternatives and individuals' vNM preferences over the alternatives, assigns a unique number -- the social inefficiency -- to each alternative. These numbers -- and not only their order -- are uniquely defined by our axioms despite no exogenously given interpersonal comparison, outside option, or disagreement point. We interpret these numbers as per-capita losses in endogenously normalized utility. We apply our social inefficiency function to a setting in which interpersonal comparison is notoriously hard to justify -- object allocation without money -- leveraging techniques from computer science to prove an approximate-efficiency result for the Random Serial Dictatorship mechanism.
title Quantifying Inefficiency
topic Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11984