IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qmw/qmwecw/971.html

The Hard Problem and the Tyranny of the Loser

Author

Listed:
  • Stan Cheung

    (School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London)

  • Marco Mariotti

    (School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London)

  • Roberto Veneziani

    (School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London)

Abstract

A Hard Problem is a collective choice problem in which the only feasiblealternatives apart from the status quo consist of a welfare gain to some people(the Winners) and a welfare loss to the others (the Losers). These problemsare typical in a number of settings, such as climate action, anti-trust regulation,and tax design. We study how to make collective choices when faced with HardProblems. We find that requiring a relatively weak fairness condition, which wecall Expansion Solidarity, necessarily leads to a dictatorship of the Losers, nomatter how small their number. Even one single Loser must be given the powerto veto any departure from the status quo, regardless of the number of Winners,how large the gains, or how small the loss.

Suggested Citation

  • Stan Cheung & Marco Mariotti & Roberto Veneziani, 2024. "The Hard Problem and the Tyranny of the Loser," Working Papers 971, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    • Handle: RePEc:qmw:qmwecw:971
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sef/media/econ/research/workingpapers/2024/wp971.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Geir B. Asheim, 2010. "Intergenerational Equity," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 2(1), pages 197-222, September.
    2. Michele Lombardi & Kaname Miyagishima & Roberto Veneziani, 2016. "Liberal Egalitarianism and the Harm Principle," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 126(597), pages 2173-2196, November.
    3. Steven J. Brams & D. Marc Kilgour, 2001. "Fallback Bargaining," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 10(4), pages 287-316, July.
    4. Anna Bogomolnaia & Hervé Moulin & Fedor Sandomirskiy & Elena Yanovskaya, 2017. "Competitive Division of a Mixed Manna," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 85(6), pages 1847-1871, November.
    5. Kalai, Ehud, 1977. "Proportional Solutions to Bargaining Situations: Interpersonal Utility Comparisons," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 45(7), pages 1623-1630, October.
    6. William Thomson, 2022. "On the axiomatic theory of bargaining: a survey of recent results," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 26(4), pages 491-542, December.
    7. Chun, Youngsub & Thomson, William, 1992. "Bargaining problems with claims," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 19-33, August.
    8. Akshath Jitendranath, 2024. "Optimization and Beyond," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-04960657, HAL.
    9. Jeffrey Richelson, 1984. "Social choice and the status quo," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 42(3), pages 225-234, January.
    10. Georgios Gerasimou, 2018. "Indecisiveness, Undesirability and Overload Revealed Through Rational Choice Deferral," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 128(614), pages 2450-2479, September.
    11. Marco Mariotti & Antonio Villar, 2005. "The Nash rationing problem," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 33(3), pages 367-377, September.
    12. R. H. Coase, 2013. "The Problem of Social Cost," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 56(4), pages 837-877.
    13. van Hees, Martin & Jitendranath, Akshath & Luttens, Roland Iwan, 2021. "Choice functions and hard choices," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    14. Mariotti, Marco & Wen, Quan, 2021. "A noncooperative foundation of the competitive divisions for bads," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 194(C).
    15. d'Aspremont, Claude & Gevers, Louis, 2002. "Social welfare functionals and interpersonal comparability," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 459-541, Elsevier.
    16. Carmen Herrero, 1997. "Endogenous reference points and the adjusted proportional solution for bargaining problems with claims," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 15(1), pages 113-119.
    17. Marco Mariotti & Roberto Veneziani, 2009. "‘Non-interference’ implies equality," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 32(1), pages 123-128, January.
    18. Efe A. Ok & Lin Zhou, 1999. "Revealed group preferences on non-convex choice problems," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 13(3), pages 671-687.
    19. Sen, Amartya, 1993. "Internal Consistency of Choice," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(3), pages 495-521, May.
    20. Peters, Hans & Wakker, Peter, 1991. "Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Revealed Group Preferences," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(6), pages 1787-1801, November.
    21. Marc Fleurbaey & Erik Schokkaert, 2013. "Behavioral Welfare Economics and Redistribution," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(3), pages 180-205, August.
    22. Akshath Jitendranath, 2024. "Optimization and Beyond," Post-Print halshs-04960657, HAL.
    23. Paul A. Samuelson, 1950. "Evaluation Of Real National Income," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 2(1), pages 1-29.
    24. José Alcantud, 2013. "Liberal approaches to ranking infinite utility streams: when can we avoid interference?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(2), pages 381-396, July.
    25. Marco Mariotti, 2000. "Collective choice functions on non-convex problems," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 16(2), pages 457-463, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Rachmilevitch, Shiran, 2025. "Nash oligarchies," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bas Dietzenbacher & Hans Peters, 2022. "Characterizing NTU-bankruptcy rules using bargaining axioms," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 318(2), pages 871-888, November.
    2. Marco Mariotti & Roberto Veneziani, 2018. "Opportunities as Chances: Maximising the Probability that Everybody Succeeds," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 128(611), pages 1609-1633, June.
    3. Ok, Efe A. & Zhou, Lin, 2000. "The Choquet Bargaining Solutions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 249-264, November.
    4. Albizuri, M.J. & Dietzenbacher, B.J. & Zarzuelo, J.M., 2020. "Bargaining with independence of higher or irrelevant claims," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 11-17.
    5. Andrea Gallice, 2019. "Bankruptcy problems with reference-dependent preferences," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 48(1), pages 311-336, March.
    6. Ok, Efe A., 1998. "Inequality averse collective choice," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 301-321, October.
    7. Thomson, William, 2003. "Axiomatic and game-theoretic analysis of bankruptcy and taxation problems: a survey," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 45(3), pages 249-297, July.
    8. L’Haridon, Olivier & Navarro, Noemí, 2025. "Nash solutions for bargaining problems with a reference point," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 239(C).
    9. Michele Lombardi & Kaname Miyagishima & Roberto Veneziani, 2016. "Liberal Egalitarianism and the Harm Principle," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 126(597), pages 2173-2196, November.
    10. Bas Dietzenbacher & Peter Borm & Arantza Estévez-Fernández, 2020. "NTU-bankruptcy problems: consistency and the relative adjustment principle," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 24(1), pages 101-122, June.
    11. Carmen Herrero & Antonio Villar, 2010. "The rights egalitarian solution for NTU sharing problems," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 39(1), pages 137-150, March.
    12. Mariotti, Marco & Veneziani, Roberto, 2012. "Allocating chances of success in finite and infinite societies: The utilitarian criterion," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(4), pages 226-236.
    13. Usher, Dan, 2001. "Personal goods, efficiency and the law," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 673-703, November.
    14. Noemí Navarro & Róbert F. Veszteg, 2025. "How robust is the equal split? Transferable utility and three-person bargaining in the laboratory," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 23(3), pages 909-931, September.
    15. Majumdar, Dipjyoti, 2004. "An axiomatic characterization of Bayes' Rule," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 47(3), pages 261-273, May.
    16. Vincent Martinet & Pedro Gajardo & Michel De Lara & Héctor Ramírez Cabrera, 2011. "Bargaining with intertemporal maximin payoffs," EconomiX Working Papers 2011-7, University of Paris Nanterre, EconomiX.
    17. M. Ali Khan & Metin Uyanık, 2021. "Topological connectedness and behavioral assumptions on preferences: a two-way relationship," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 71(2), pages 411-460, March.
    18. Marco Mariotii, 1996. "Fair bargains: distributive justice and Nash Bargaining Theory," Game Theory and Information 9611003, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 06 Dec 1996.
    19. KIbrIs, Özgür & TapkI, Ipek Gürsel, 2010. "Bargaining with nonanonymous disagreement: Monotonic rules," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 233-241, January.
    20. Chambers, Christopher P. & Ye, Siming, 2024. "Haves and have-nots: A theory of economic sufficientarianism," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 217(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General

    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:qmw:qmwecw:971. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Nicholas Owen The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Nicholas Owen to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deqmwuk.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.