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Journal of Economic Inequality (2005) 3: 183186 Springer 2005
DOI: 10.1007/s10888-004-7784-8Fair Division and Collective Welfare by Herv J. Moulin, MIT Press, 2003Questions of distributive justice arise when considering how to design or reform a
societys basic social institutions. They also arise when considering resource allocation problems such as how to ration access to a computer server, how to split the
cost of building a facility that will be used in common by a number of individuals,
and how to divide the surplus from a joint enterprise when the value of any one
persons contribution depends on the contributions of other individuals. Moulins
book is concerned with distributive justice in these kinds of concrete everyday
situations. It is based on a course that Moulin has offered at Rice University and is
intended to be used as a text for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate
students.The literature that Moulin draws on is quite technical. Much of it is concerned
with axiomatically characterizing particular mechanisms (or classes of mechanisms) for solving allocation problems of the kind described above. A text based
on these theorems and their proofs would be too advanced for undergraduates,
so, for the most part, Moulin instead introduces students to this literature by analyzing stylized examples in which functional forms and values for the parameters
are specified. These examples have been designed to illustrate general theoretical
points. In this way, the reader learns how to compute the solution that is obtained
using a particular mechanism and he develops intuition about the properties of this
mechanism by seeing how the solution changes as the parameters of the problem
are varied. While some characterization theorems are mentioned at various points
in the text, they are not the focus of this book.The knowledge gained from analyzing these mechanisms is reinforced by 88
end-of-chapter problems that either test students mastery of each topic or help
them develop further insight about this material. While most of these problems are
computational in nature, some of them ask for proofs of propositions that cannot
be answered by performing some computation.For example, when considering the problem of allocating a divisible homogeneous good among individuals with incompatible claims for this resource, Moulin
describes a number of different procedures for resolving these conflicting claims,
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