Distributional Preferences for Market Design

Institutions care both about whom they select and the composition of the resulting group.

We identify an upper-bound property and two exchange properties on distributional preferences.

Conditional on the upper-bound property, the exchange properties are jointly necessary and sufficient for two results under every priority ranking: the greedy rule is the unique choice rule that is non-wasteful, distributionally maximal, and free of justified envy; and it is also path independent.

In matching markets, deferred acceptance is the unique mechanism satisfying the three axioms, individual rationality, and strategy-proofness.

Our framework accommodates intersectional identities and subsumes models based on reserves and matroids.