Open Access
On procedural freedom of choice
(2004) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Economía; Ekonomia
Numerous works in the last decade have analyzed the question of how to compare opportunity sets as a way to measure and evaluate individual freedom of choice. This paper defends that, in many contexts, external procedural aspects that are associated to an opportunity set should be taken into account when making judgements about the freedom of choice an agent enjoys. We propose criteria for comparing procedure-based opportunity sets that are consistent with both the procedural aspect of freedom and most of the standard theories of ranking opportunity sets.
Open Access
Freedom of choice: the leximax criterion in the infinite case
(2006) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Besada, M.; Nieto Vázquez, Jorge; Vázquez, C.; Economía; Ekonomia
Many recent works have investigated the problem of extending a preference over a set of alternatives to its power set, in an attempt to provide a formal representation of the notion of freedom of choice. In general, results are limited to the finite case, which excludes, for instance, the case of economic environments. This paper deals with the possibility of extending those results to the context where the basic set of alternatives is the n-dimensional Euclidean space. We present an extension of the leximax criterion described by Bossert, Pattanaik and Xu (1994) to this more general framework.
Open Access
Participation in and provision of public goods: does granularity matter?
(Springer, 2020) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Osés Eraso, Nuria; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We use public goods games to experimentally investigate the effect of granularity (i.e., the degree of divisibility of the space of feasible contribution options) on participation (whether individuals contribute or not to the public good) and public goods provision (total contribution to the public good). Our results show that granularity has a significant effect on participation, mainly when coarser granularity eliminates the possibility of small contributions. However, this change in participation does not lead to a significant change in the total provision of the public good. These results are aligned with other experimental field results obtained in the context of donations and fundraising.
Open Access
Fair competition design
(2018) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We study the impact of two basic principles of fairness on the structure of competition systems and perform our analysis by focusing on sports competitions. The first principle states that equally strong players should have the same chances of being the final winner, while the second principle requires that the competition system should not favor weaker players. We apply these requirements to a class of competitions which includes, but is not limited to, the sport tournament systems that are most commonly used in practice, such as round-robin tournaments and different kinds of knockout competitions, and we characterize the structures satisfying these requirements. In our results, a new competition structure that we call an antler is found to play a referential role. Finally, we show that the class of fair competition systems becomes rather small when both fairness principles are jointly applied.
Open Access
On the aversion to incomplete preferences
(Springer, 2021) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Bourgeois-Gironde, Sacha; Hualde Vidaurre, Mikel; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
We propose an axiomatization of aversion to incomplete preferences. Some prevailing models of incomplete preferences rely on the hypothesis that incompleteness is temporary and that by keeping their opportunity set open individuals reveal a preference for flexibility. We consider that the maintenance of incomplete preference is also aversive. Our model allows us to show how incompleteness induces an aversive attitude in two different ways: intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsic aversion holds when one instance of incomplete preference in the set suffices to decrease its utility. Instrumental aversion holds only insofar dominating options are affected by incompleteness. Given two partially overlapping sets of axioms on the binary relation over sets we formalize their consistency with the two types of aversion to incompleteness. Finally, we relate our model to the classical Sen's distinction between tentative and assertive incompleteness. The spelling out of this distinction in the terms of our approach uncovers to what extent aversion to incompleteness may be compatible with a preference for flexibility.
Open Access
A theory of choice under internal conflict
(2012) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Teschl, Miriam; Economía; Ekonomia
In this paper we discuss, inspired by some psychological literature, that choices are the outcome of the interplay of different, potentially conflicting motivations. We propose an axiomatic approach with two motivations, which we assume to be single-peaked over a certain given dimension. We first consider the case in which motivations are given and stable, and then introduce the possibility for motivations to change. We show first that in the no-motivation change case, certain choice behaviours that appear to be inconsistent from the standard rational choice point of view may be explained in our framework as the outcome of conflicting motivations. Afterwards, in the case of motivation change, we present two psychologically-flavoured assumptions about how motivations are influenced by choices. We show that, with some additional weak assumptions of rationality, motivation change leads to a smaller range of potentially inconsistent choices and not to a larger one as one may think. In particular, conflicts between two motivations can eventually be resolved by choosing different actions and consequently a definite and final preference for an action be revealed.
Open Access
Manipulative agendas in four-candidate elections
(Elsevier, 2020) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We consider a setting where it is known for an electorate what probability a given candidate has of beating another in a pairwise ballot. An agenda assigns candidates to the leaves of a binary tree and is called manipulative if it inverts the final winning probabilities for two candidates. We compare standard and symmetric agendas in four-candidate elections and show that in monotone environments the former are more manipulative.
Open Access
Fair elimination-type competitions
(Elsevier, 2020) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We study the impact of two basic principles of fairness on the structure of elimination-type competitions and perform our analysis by focusing on sports competitions. The first principle states that stronger players should have a larger chance of winning than weaker players, while the second principle provides equally strong players the same chances of being the final winner. We apply these requirements to different kinds of knockout competitions, and characterise the structures satisfying them. In our results, a new competition structure that we call an antler is found to play a referential role.
Open Access
League competitions and fairness
(Springer, 2023) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Economía; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE
We formulate two fairness principles and characterize the league competition systems that satisfy them. The first principle requires that all players should have the same chance of being the final winner if all players are equally strong, while the second states that the league competition should not favor weaker players. We apply these requirements to a class of systems which includes round-robin tournaments as a particular case.
Open Access
Power set extensions of dichotomous preferences
(Elsevier, 2016) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper is devoted to the study of how to extend a dichotomous partition of a universal set X into good and bad objects to an ordering on the power set of X. We introduce a family of rules that naturally take into account the number of good objects and the number of bad objects, and provide axiomatic characterizations of two rules that are particularly appealing when it comes to compating sets in which the good