2025/06/23 by Inácio Bó, Bó, Inácio, Gian Caspari +3
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Auction Theory and Applications #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Economics and business #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Theoretical Economics (econ.TH)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.19176
openalex publication_date 2025/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Priority-based allocation of individuals to positions are pervasive, and elimination of justified envy is often, an absolute requirement. This leaves serial dictatorship (SD) as the only rule that avoids justified envy under standard direct mechanisms. What if SD outcomes are undesirable from a designer's perspective? We propose visible fairness, which demands fairness relative to the (potentially purposefully incomplete) preference information the mechanism elicits. Visibly fair mechanisms generalize SD; we fully characterize them and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for strategy-proofness. We show how to apply these results to design strategy-proof visibly fair rules that satisfy a broad class of distributional objectives. Visible fairness, however, results in a new information-efficiency trade-off: meeting distributional goals leads to the avoidance of eliciation of information about preferences that could prevent inefficiencies.