IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cwl/cwldpp/1582.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Kantian Allocations

Author

Abstract

Several authors in the economics literature have referred to Kantian behavior, informally, as a kind of cooperation. We model this notion precisely, and define two kinds of Kantian allocation. An set of strategies by players is Kantian if, informally, no player would advocate that all players change their strategies in the 'same kind of way.' We prove existence and Pareto efficiency of Kantian allocations. The proportional solution in a production economy with a common access technology emerges as a special case. We study whether Kantian behavior can 'resolve' the prisoners' dilemma and the voting paradox. It turns out that Kant's categorical imperative only implies cooperation (solidaristic behavior) conditional upon the rewards to cooperation being sufficiently great, perhaps a sobering thought for philosophical Kantians who believe that Kant's categorical imperative implies a strong kind of solidarity.

Suggested Citation

  • John E. Roemer, 2006. "Kantian Allocations," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1582, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
  • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1582
    Note: CFP 1323.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d15/d1582.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tasos Kalandrakis, 2009. "Robust rational turnout," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 41(2), pages 317-343, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cooperative solution; Proportional solution; Voting paradox; Prisoners' dilemma; Kant; Categorical imperative;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C71 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Cooperative Games
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1582. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Brittany Ladd (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cowleus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.