Fair Allocation Rules

Abstract

From Introduction:

"Economists are often criticized for paying little attention to issues of fairness in distribution. It is indeed true that many shy away from making recommendations on the fair allocation of goods and services, perhaps fearing the necessary reliance on value judgments of such recommendations. However, in the last thirty years, a variety of formal criteria of economic justice have been introduced that have broad conceptual appeal as well as significant operational power. Our purpose is to review this literature. Mathematically, the objects of study are mappings that associate with each economy in some domain a non-empty subset of its set of feasible allocations. These mappings are called 'solutions' or 'rules.'"