This course will focus on the axiomatic approach in the first half which will include reading papers on voting and social choice theory. The second half of the course will be devoted to the study of Fair Division Problems, which incorporates the four principles of distributive justice: compensation, reward, exogenous rights, and fitness. The concepts of equal gains, equal losses, and proportional gains and losses will be described. The course will also discuss three cardinal measures of collective welfare: Bentham's "utilitarian" proposal to maximize the sum of individual utilities, the Nash product, and the egalitarian leximin ordering. The market outcome as a solution to inefficiencies caused by externalities (tragedy of the commons) will be discussed, along with fair trade, two-sided matching market where we will discuss the top-trading cycle and the deferred acceptance algorithm to achieve an efficient allocation.
Prereqs: ECO 2101 (Microeconomic Theory I), ECO-1010 (Mathematics for Economists)