Title: Random assignment under ordinal preferences: a separation characterisation

Authors: Ping Zhan

Addresses: Department of Communication and Business, Edogawa University, Nagareyama City, Chiba, 270-0198, Japan

Abstract: Assignment problems include allocating a set of objects among agents; here, only ordinal preferences are revealed. In this paper, we establish a condition of feasible solutions for deterministic assignments. Related to it, we show then a separation characterisation for probabilistic serial (PS) mechanism, based on sd-efficiency, sd-envy-freeness and the definition of PS (where 'sd' stands for first-order stochastic dominance). An application to recent result about PS is also described. Models here are suitable for assignment problems in various fields, such as fair sharing of resources in industry. The separation structure proposed here provides a possibility to divide a large-scale problem into several sub-problems.

Keywords: bipartite-graph; deterministic and random assignment; serial rule; ordinal efficiency; leximin; sharing problem.

DOI: 10.1504/AJMSA.2017.083508

Asian Journal of Management Science and Applications, 2017 Vol.3 No.1, pp.50 - 60

Received: 02 May 2016
Accepted: 07 Nov 2016
Published online: 08 Apr 2017 *

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