Person:
Alcalde Unzu, Jorge

Last Name

Alcalde Unzu

First Name

Jorge

person.page.departamento

Economía

person.page.instituteName

INARBE. Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics

ORCID

0000-0003-1839-6245

person.page.upna

4338

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 18

Open Access
The measurement of the value of a language
(Elsevier, 2022) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Moreno Ternero, Juan D.; Weber, Shlomo; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We address the problem of assessing the value of a language. We consider a stylized model of multilingual societies in which we introduce axioms formalizing the principles of impartiality, monotonicity, invariance and consistency. We show that the combination of these axioms characterizes a family of communicative benefit functions which assign a value to each language in the society. The functions within the family involve a two-step procedure. First, they identify the groups of agents that can communicate in each language. Second, each group is assigned an aggregate (size-dependent) value, which is evenly divided among the languages in which the group can communicate. Our novel approach could be useful in a wide range of empirical applications and policy decisions.
Open Access
Size approval voting
(2007) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Vorsatz, Marc; Economía; Ekonomia
We propose a new class of voting rules, called Size Approval Voting. According to this rule, the effective weight of a vote from a given individual depends on how many other alternatives the very same individual votes for. In particular, weights are assumed to be non-negative and weakly decreasing in the number of approved alternatives. Then, for a given profile of individual votes, all those alternatives with the maximal sum of weighted votes are elected. We show in our axiomatic analysis that the family of all Size Approval Voting is characterized by a set of natural properties.
Open Access
Allocating the costs of cleaning a river: expected responsibility versus median responsibility
(Springer, 2020) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Gómez Rúa, María; Molis Bañales, Elena; Economía; Ekonomia
We consider the problem of cleaning a transboundary river, proposed by Ni and Wang (Games Econ Behav 60:176–186, 2007). A river is modeled as a segment divided into subsegments, each occupied by one region, from upstream to downstream. The waste is transferred from one region to the next at some rate. Since this transfer rate may be unknown, the social planner could have uncertainty over each region’s responsibility. Two natural candidates to distribute the costs in this setting would be the method that assigns to each region its expected responsibility and the one that assigns to each region its median responsibility. We show that the latter is equivalent to the Upstream Responsibility method (Alcalde-Unzu et al. in Games Econ Behav 90:134–150, 2015) and the former is a new method that we call Expected Responsibility. We compare both solutions and analyze them in terms of a new property of monotonicity.
Open Access
Constrained school choice: an experimental QRE analysis
(Springer, 2023) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Klijn, Flip; Vorsatz, Marc; Economía; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE
The theoretical literature on public school choice proposes centralized mechanisms that assign children to schools on the basis of parents’ preferences and the priorities children have for different schools. The related experimental literature analyzes in detail how various mechanisms fare in terms of welfare and stability of the resulting matchings, yet often provides only aggregate statistics of the individual behavior that leads to these outcomes (i.e., the degree to which subjects tell the truth in the induced simultaneous move game). In this paper, we show that the quantal response equilibrium (QRE) adequately describes individual behavior and the resulting matching in three constrained problems for which the immediate acceptance mechanism and the student-optimal stable mechanism coincide. Specifically, the comparative statics of the logit-QRE with risk-neutral and expected-payoff-maximizing agents capture the directional changes of subject behavior and the prevalence of the different stable matchings when cardinal payoffs (i.e., relative preference intensities) are modified in the experiment.
Open Access
Uncertainty with ordinal likelihood information
(2007) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper proposes a new framework of choice under uncertainty, where the only information available to the decision maker is about the the ordinal likelihood of the different outcomes each action generates. This contrasts both with the classical models where the potential outcomes of each action have an associated probability distribution, and with the more recent complete uncertainty models, where the agent has no information whatever about the probability of the outcomes, even of an ordinal nature. We present an impossibility result in our framework, and some ways to circumvent it that result in different ranking rules.
Open Access
Non anonymous ballot aggregation: an axiomatic generalization of Approval Voting
(2011) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Vorsatz, Marc; Economía; Ekonomia
We study axiomatically situations in which the society agrees to treat voters with different characteristics distinctly. In this setting, we propose a set of six intuitive axioms and show that they jointly characterize a new class of voting procedures, called Personalized Approval Voting. According to this family, each voter has a strictly positive and finite weight (the weight is necessarily the same for all voters with the same characteristics) and the alternative with the highest number of weighted votes is elected. Hence, the implemented voting procedure reduces to Approval Voting in case all voters are identical or the procedure assigns the same weight to all types.
Open Access
Measuring the cohesiveness of preferences: an axiomatic analysis
(Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Vorsatz, Marc; Economía; Ekonomia
In this paper, we axiomatically study how to measure the similarity of preferences in a group of individuals. For simplicity, we refer to this as the cohesiveness. First, we provide axioms that characterize a family of linear and additive measures whose intersection is a partial ordinal criterion similar to first order stochastic dominance. The introduction of some additional properties isolates a one-parameter subfamily. This parameter evaluates the effect on the cohesiveness if one individual changes his ranking on a single pair of objects, as a function of how many of the remaining individuals in the group rank the first object over the second and vice versa. Finally, we characterize the focal measures of this subfamily separately showing that they coincide with measures constructed using two, at first sight, totally different approaches suggested in the literature.
Open Access
Solidarity to achieve stability
(Elsevier, 2024) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Gallo, Oihane; Iñarra, Elena; Moreno Ternero, Juan D.; Economía; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PJUPNA2023-11403
Agents may form coalitions. Each coalition shares its endowment among its agents by applying a sharing rule. The sharing rule induces a coalition formation problem by assuming that agents rank coalitions according to the allocation they obtain in the corresponding sharing problem. We characterize the sharing rules that induce a class of stable coalition formation problems as those that satisfy a natural axiom that formalizes the principle of solidarity. Thus, solidarity becomes a sufficient condition to achieve stability.
Open Access
Strategy-proof location of public facilities
(Elsevier, 2018) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Vorsatz, Marc; Economía; Ekonomia
Consider the problem of locating a public facility taking into account the agents' preferences. To construct strategy-proof social choice rules, we propose a new preference domain that allows agents to have any single-peaked or any single-dipped preference on the location of the facility such that the peak/dip of the preference is in her own location. We characterize all strategy-proof rules in this general framework and study the conditions under which this family of strategy-proof rules includes non-dictatorial rules that have more than two alternatives in the range or that are Pareto efficient. Finally, we characterize for some focal cases all strategy-proof and Pareto efficient rules.
Open Access
Sharing the costs of cleaning a river: the Upstream Responsibility rule
(Elsevier, 2015) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Gómez Rúa, María; Molis Bañales, Elena; Economía; Ekonomia
The cleaning up of waste present in transboundary rivers, which requires the cooperation of different authorities, is a problematic issue, especially when responsibility for the discharge of the waste is not well-defined. Following Ni and Wang (2007) we assume that a river is a segment divided into several regions from upstream to downstream. We show that when the transfer rate of the waste is unknown, the clean-up cost vector provides useful information for estimating some limits in regard to the responsibility of each region. We propose a cost allocation rule, the Upstream Responsibility rule, which takes into account these limits in distributing costs “fairly” and we provide an axiomatic characterization of this rule via certain properties based on basic ideas concerning the responsibility of regions.