An Application of Fixed-point Theory to Probabilistic Social Choice

Abstract: The purpose of this note is to prove the existence of a randomized mechanism, a social decision scheme (SDS), with desirable fairness, efficiency, and strategyproofness properties unmatched by all known SDSs. In particular, we disprove a conjecture by Aziz et al. (2013). Additionally, we obtain a strong existence result for the domain of random assignment. Both, the notion of efficiency and strategyproofness are based on stochastic dominance and have been studied extensively for random assignment. The proof makes crucial use of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem and is hence non-constructive. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a fixed-point theorem to show the existence of a social choice function or mechanism.