arXiv subjects

Xu Lang

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Lang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

A Belief-Based Characterization of Reduced-Form Auctions

We study games of chance (e.g., pokers, dices, horse races) in the form of agents' first-order posterior beliefs about game outcomes. We ask for any profile of agents' posterior beliefs, is there a game that can generate these beliefs? We completely characterize all feasible joint posterior beliefs from these games. The characterization enables us to find a new variant of Border's inequalities (Border, 1991), which we call a belief-based characterization of Border's inequalities. It also leads to a generalization of Aumann's Agreement Theorem. We show that the characterization results are powerful in bounding the correlation of agents' joint posterior beliefs.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2023

Symmetric reduced form voting

We study a model of voting with two alternatives in a symmetric environment. We characterize the interim allocation probabilities that can be implemented by a symmetric voting rule. We show that every such interim allocation probabilities can be implemented as a convex combination of two families of deterministic voting rules: qualified majority and qualified anti-majority. We also provide analogous results by requiring implementation by a symmetric monotone (strategy-proof) voting rule and by a symmetric unanimous voting rule. We apply our results to show that an ex-ante Rawlsian rule is a convex combination of a pair of qualified majority rules.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2022

Two-Person Bargaining when the Disagreement Point is Private Information

We consider two-person bargaining problems in which (only) the disagreement outcome is private (and possibly correlated) information and it is common knowledge that disagreement is inefficient. We show that if the Pareto frontier is linear, the outcome of an ex post efficient mechanism cannot depend on the disagreement payoffs. If the frontier is non-linear, the result continues to hold when the disagreement payoffs are independent or there is a player with at most two types. We discuss implications of these results for axiomatic bargaining theory and for full surplus extraction in mechanism design.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2022

Reduced-Form Allocations with Complementarity: A 2-Person Case

We investigate the implementation of reduced-form allocation probabilities in a two-person bargaining problem without side payments, where the agents have to select one alternative from a finite set of social alternatives. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the implementability. We find that the implementability condition in bargaining has some new feature compared to Border's theorem. Our results have applications in compromise problems and package exchange problems where the agents barter indivisible objects and the agents value the objects as complements.

econ.TH↗