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The positive consequence of strategic manipulation in indivisible good allocation

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Abstract

It is well known that any decision efficient, budget balanced, and envy-free mechanism for allocating a single object with transfers is vulnerable to manipulation. In this paper we examine whether the possible manipulations can have a serious impact on the outcome. Specifically, we examine which allocations are realized in the direct revelation game of any rule satisfying certain normative properties. For this class of rules we show that decision efficient, budget balanced, and envy-free allocations are the only ones realized through an ɛ-Nash equilibrium for any sufficiently small ɛ > 0.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. JSPS Research Fellow/ISER, Osaka University, 6-1 Mihogaoka Ibaraki, Osaka, 567-0047, Japan

    Yuji Fujinaka

  2. Department of Economics, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, 240-8501, Japan

    Toyotaka Sakai

Authors
  1. Yuji Fujinaka
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  2. Toyotaka Sakai
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Correspondence to Toyotaka Sakai.

Additional information

This paper was formerly circulated under the title “Allocations most realizable through strategic manipulation”. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee, Shinji Ohseto, and Rakesh Vohra for their very detailed comments. They also thank seminar/conference participants at Kobe University, Osaka University, Kyoto University, University of Tokyo, the Spring 2006 meeting of Japanese Economic Association at Fukushima University, and the eighth international meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in Istanbul for helpful comments. Sakai acknowledges the financial support by KAKENHI (19310031).

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Fujinaka, Y., Sakai, T. The positive consequence of strategic manipulation in indivisible good allocation. Int J Game Theory 38, 325–348 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00182-009-0156-7

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