Four essays on equilibrium selection, fair allocation and voting

Abstract

This dissertation contains three chapters on equilibrium selection, fair allocation and voting. The first paper in chapter 2 contains results that make it easier to use global games for deriving equilibrium predictions in games of strategic complementarities. Moreover in a second paper, we analyse the relationship between noise independence of this global game selection and the property of equilibria to be robust to incomplete information. Chapter 3 considers the problem of achieving a fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods. Here we find that a number of fairness criteria are incompatible with one another. Besides such impossibility results, we identify a new solution that satisfies a maximal number of our fairness criteria as well as Pareto efficiency. Chapter 4 analyses voting procedures with respect to their ability to aggregate voters preferences despite the fact that voters may vote strategically. In particular we characterize the Borda Rule and Approval Voting according to a small number of intuitive axioms.