The Core of Shapley-Scarf markets with couples

Abstract

We extend the Shapley-Scarf model of markets for indivisible goods without money to the case where couples of agents have joint preferences over the set of allocations. We show that the domain of (weakly) lexicographic preferences is maximal (for inclusion) for the existence of Core allocations. This result also holds in the case where the set of agents is partitioned into non-empty coalitions with any size, as well as for the class of markets studied in Konishi et al. (2001), where individuals exchange several types of purely indivisible goods. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.