Entropy, desegregation, and proportional rationing

When the fair outcome optimizes an unambiguous index of fairness, the presence of exogenous, normatively neutral, constraints complicates the optimization problem but raises no conceptual issue. The proportional outcome, for bipartite assignment or rationing, minimizes many di¤erent indices, so that taking additional constraints into account is not straightforward. Consistency is a general separability requirement for resource allocation rules that is especially natural in these two models. By imposing this requirement on the assignment or rationing rules, we identify a canonical index of proportional fairness. It is the entropy of the assignment matrix, exactly like the Mutual Information index of segregation ([15]), or of the rationing matrix augmented by individual de…cits, exactly like the bipartite proportional method in [13]. Acknowledgments: cricital comments by Gabrielle Demange, Francois Maniquet, Jay Sethuraman, Oscar Volij, Peyton Young, and seminar participants in Glasg...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: JET
• Authors: Hervé Moulin
• Keywords: JET 2016