Diego M. Caramuta |  Research

Ph.D. in Economics (Candidate)

International Doctorate in Economic Analysis (IDEA)

 

  

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Working Papers:

            We consider a collection of problems where a group of individuals must choose an interval, e.g., a range of values for a policy, a time frame to deliver a service, a location and size for a facility. We study the existence of strategy-proof voting procedures in that context. Our main characterization result depends crucially on the number of choices that voters are presented with. This allows us to remark that controlling for the number of alternatives can be a determinant tool for a designer. In our context, there is a choice of alternative voting procedures when the range is constrained to be small, while unanimity rule remains as the only possibility in contexts where agents are a priori given more choices.

  • The Symmetric Location of Public Facilities 

            We consider the problem of a government that has to locate two identical public facilities. We assume that there are no complementarities in the use of the facilities and that these are not subject to congestion, i.e. individuals do not care about who or how many individuals are consuming each of the public goods. On the other hand, we assume that individuals do care about the location of the facilities, and that their preferences over the different possible locations of the public goods are single-peaked. In this framework, we characterize those social choice functions that are strategy-proof, weakly-efficient, anonymous and satisfy a new notion of fairness.

  • Where to Locate a Nuclear Power Plant and its Dumpsite? The Location of Multiple Public Facilities with Single-dipped Preferences

            There is no doubt that the decision of where to locate a nuclear power plant and/or a nuclear dump site is an important social decision. In this paper, we model this problem as the social decision of where to locate multiple public goods in a line, when individuals’ preferences are single dipped. We consider two alternative assumptions about individuals’ preferences: (i) the min-extension, i.e., given two alternatives individuals only compare the locations that are less preferred in each alternative; and (ii) the lexicographic extension, i.e., given two alternatives first individuals compare the locations that are less preferred in each alternative, if there is a tie, then they compare the second less preferred locations in each alternative, and so on. We also consider several axioms that the social decision should satisfy, for example, that there is no other alternative such that some individuals are better off without affecting the well being of the others (efficiency). Another axiom is strategy-proofness, that is, that no individual can gain misrepresenting her preferences. In this paper, we characterize the social choice functions defined on the min-extension that are strategy-proof and efficient. We also provide the characterization of social choice functions defined on the same extension that are strategy-proof, efficient and nonbossy; and strategy-proof, efficient, nonbossy and anonymous.
            At the moment, we are working on the characterization using the lexicographic extension.

Publications:

Articles

Chapters in Books

Published Working Papers

Other:

  • This is a program that I made in C. It checks whether a profile of preferences is single-peaked or not, when there is no obvious order for the set of alternatives (Download).