Unfolding the mystery of false-name-proofness

Abstract

We study the general problem of public choice. We consider environments where agents’ identities may not be observable. A “rule” associates a preference profile with an alternative. An agent may create fictitious identities and submit multiple preference relations under them. We study false-name-proofness, the requirement that no agent should ever gain via such operations. Our main result is that if a rule is anonymous, strategy-proof, and population monotonic, then it is false-name-proof; if the preference domain contains only strict preference relations, the converse also holds.