Open Access
Attitudes toward choice with incomplete preferences: an experimental study
(Elsevier, 2022) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Bourgeois-Gironde, Sacha; Hualde Vidaurre, Mikel; Economía; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PJUPNA19-2022
We present an experiment to test different individual attitudes toward choice, such as preference for flexibility, choice aversion, betweenness and choice neutrality. Unlike other related experimental papers, we want to analyze whether different choice attitudes can coexist for the same subject, depending on the characteristics of the choice set she is facing. In particular, our main hypothesis is that the presence of incomparability among the alternatives in the choice set, and the time at which such incomparability is solved, affect crucially the kind of attitude towards choice that the subject will exhibit. We find that, indeed, choice attitudes are not homogeneous across choice sets, yet they are conditional on the preferences over the alternatives. We also find some evidence supporting that subjects tend to value heuristically sets as a whole.
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
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
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
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
Pareto rationalizability by two single-peaked preferences
(Elsevier, 2022) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Teschl, Miriam; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We study, in a finite setting, the problem of Pareto rationalizability of choice functions by means of a preference profile that is single-peaked with respect to an exogenously given linear order over the alternatives. This problem requires a new condition to be added to those that characterize Pareto rationalizability in the general domain of orders (Moulin (1985)). This new condition appeals to the existence of a central range of options such that the choice function excludes alternatives which are distant from that range.