IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v15y1997i1p57-66.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The replacement principle in economies with indivisible goods

Author

Listed:
  • William Thomson

    (Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA)

Abstract

We consider the problem of allocating a list of indivisible goods and some amount of an infinitely divisible good among agents with equal rights on these resources, and investigate the implications of the following requirement on allocation rules: when the preferences of some of the agents change, all agents whose preferences are fixed should (weakly) gain, or they should all (weakly) lose. This condition is an application of a general principle of solidarity discussed in Thomson (1990b) under the name "replacement principle". We look for selections from the no-envy solution satisfying this property. We show that in the general case, when the number of objects is arbitrary, there is no such selection. However, in the one-object case (a single prize), up to Pareto-indifference, there is only one selection from the no-envy solution satisfying the property. Such a solution always selects an envy-free allocation at which the winner of the prize is indifferent between his bundle and the losers' common bundle.

Suggested Citation

  • William Thomson, 1997. "The replacement principle in economies with indivisible goods," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 15(1), pages 57-66.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:57-66
    Note: Received: 15 May 1995 / Accepted: 5 June 1996
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/7015001/70150057.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/7015001/70150057.ps.gz
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C51 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Construction and Estimation

    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:spr:sochwe:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:57-66. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.