Dr. Huaxia Zeng’s paper entitled “Random Mechanism Design on Multidimensional Domains” has been accepted in the Journal of Economic Theory, a tier-one journal in Economics. The co-author is Shurojit Chatterji.
Associate Professor Huaxia Zeng joined the SOE in 2018 as a tenure-track faculty member with a Ph.D. degree from Singapore Management University. His research interest concerns microeconomics and mechanism design. His three previous papers were published in Games and Economic BehaviorandTheoretical Economics.
Random Mechanism Design on Multidimensional Domains
Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng
Abstract: We study random mechanism design in an environment where the set of alternatives has a Cartesian product structure. We first show that all generalized random dictatorships are sd-strategy-proof on a minimally rich domain if and only if all preferences are top-separable. We call a domain satisfying top-separability a multidimensional domain, and furthermore generalize the notion of connectedness (Monjardet, 2009) to a broad class of multidimensional domains: connected+ domains. We show that in the class of minimally rich and connected+ domains, the multidimensional single-peakedness restriction is necessary and sufficient for the design of a flexible random social choice function that is unanimous and sd-strategy-proof. Such a flexible random social choice function allows for a systematic notion of compromise. We prove an analogous result for deterministic social choice functions satisfying anonymity. Our characterization remains valid for a problem of voting under constraints where not all alternatives are feasible (Barberà, Massó and Neme, 1997).
