William Thomson
Elmer B. Milliman Distinguished Professor in Economics
Professor of Economics
PhD, Stanford, 1976
- Office Location
- 211 Harkness Hall
- Telephone
- (585) 275-2236
- Web Address
- Website
Office Hours: By appointment
Research Overview
Research Interests
- Game Theory
- Theory of Equity
- Mechanism Design
Selected Publications
Selected Papers and Publications
- "The fair division of a fixed supply among a growing population," Mathematics of Operations Research, 8 (1983), 319-326.
- "A study of choice correspondences in economies with a variable number of agents," Journal of Economic Theory, 46 (1988), 237-254.
- Axiomatic Theory of Bargaining With a Variable Population (with T.Lensberg), Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- "Can everyone benefit from growth? Two difficulties" (with H. Moulin), Journal of Mathematical Economics (1988), 339-345.
- "No-envy and consistency in economies with indivisible goods" (with K. Tadenuma), Econometrica, 59 (1991) 1755-1767.
- "Population-monotonic solutions to the problem of fair division when preferences are single-peaked," Economic Theory, 5 (1995), 229-246.
- A Guide for the Young Economist, 2nd Edition, M.I.T. Press, 2011.
Forthcoming Publications and Recent Papers
- “On the axiomatic theory of bargaining: a survey of recent results”, Review of Economic Design 26 (2022), 491-542.
- “Where should your daughter go to college? An axiomatic analysis”, Social Choice and Welfare 60 (2023), 313-330.
- “Consistent queueing rules” (with Rodrigo Velez), Mathematical Pro-gramming, forthcoming, 2023.
- “Agent-wise replication invariance and the Walrasian correspondence”, mimeo, January 2023.
- “Partial-implementation invariance and claims problems”, (with B. Di-etzenbacher and Y. Tamura), mimeo, March 2023.
Surveys
- "Cooperative models of bargaining," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications (R. Aumann and S. Hart, eds.), North Holland, 1994, 1237-1284.
- “Population-monotonic allocation rules”, Chapter 4 in Social Choice, Welfare, and Ethics (W. Barnett, H. Moulin, M. Salles and N. Schofield, eds) Cambridge University Press, 1995, 79-124.
- "Welfare-domination under preference-replacement: a survey and open questions", Social Choice and Welfare 16 (1999), 373-394.
- "On the axiomatic method and its recent applications to game theory and resource allocation", Social Choice and Welfare, 18 (2001), 327- 387.
- "Axiomatic and game-theoretic analysis of bankruptcy and taxation problems: a survey", Mathematical Social Sciences, 45 (2003), 249-297.
- “Consistency and its converse: an introduction”, Review of Economic Design 15 (2011), 257-291.
- Fair allocation rules”, in Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare (K. Arrow, A. Sen, and K. Suzumura, eds), North-Holland, Amsterdam, New York, 2011, 393-506.
- "Airport problems and cost allocation", Rochester Center for Economic Research WP, 2013.
- “Fair allocation”, in Handbook of Well-being and Public Policy, (M. Adller and M. Fleurbaey, eds), Oxford University Press, 2016, 193-226.
- “On the axiomatic theory of bargaining: a survey of recent results”, Review of Economic Design 26 (2022), 491-542.