Abstract
We study the empirical content of serial dictatorship and the core of housing markets. Under serial dictatorship, allocations reveal restrictions on the power ranking between agents. Testing for consistency with serial dictatorship amounts to checking whether there is an ordering satisfying these restrictions, which can be done using a simple generalization of the procedure used to check SARP. When it comes to voluntary trade instead, we characterize the empirical content of the core in Shapley and Scarf (J Math Econ 1:23–27, 1974) housing markets using revealed top-trading cycles. This characterization proves useful in many examples, but is also used to show that testing core consistency can be much more complex.
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de Clippel, G., Rozen, K. Empirical content of classic assignment methods: jungle and market economy. Econ Theory 76, 813–825 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-022-01479-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-022-01479-5