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.
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
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
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
Sharing the costs of cleaning a river: the upstream responsibility rule
(2013) 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 [12] 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 ach 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.
Open Access
Non-anonymous ballot aggregation: an axiomatic generalization of Approval Voting
(Elsevier, 2013) 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 intuitive axioms and show that they jointly characterize a new class of voting procedures, called Type-weighted 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. The implemented voting procedure reduces to Approval Voting in case all voters are identical or the procedure assigns the same weight to all types. Using this idea, we also obtain a new characterization of Approval Voting.