Abstract A house allocation rule should be flexible in its response to changes in agents’ preferences. We propose a specific notion of this flexibility. An agent is said to be swap-sovereign over a pair of houses at a profile of preferences if the rule assigns her one of the houses at that profile and assigns her the other house when she instead reports preferences that simply swap the positions of the two houses. A pair of agents is said to be mutually swap-sovereign over their assignments at a profile if the rule exchanges their assignments when they together report such ‘swap preferences’. An allocation rule is individually swap-flexible if any pair of houses has a swap-sovereign agent, and is mutually swap-flexible if any pair of houses has either a swap-sovereign agent or mutually swap-sovereign agents. We show for housing markets that the top-trading-cycles rule is the unique strategy-proof, individually rational and mutually swap-flexible rule. In house allocation problems, we show that queue-based priority rules are uniquely strategy-proof, individually swap-flexible and envy non-bossy. Varying the strength of non-bossiness, we characterise the important subclasses of sequential priority rules (additionally non-bossy) and serial priority rules (additionally pair-non-bossy and pair-sovereign).

中文翻译：

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房屋分配的互换灵活性

摘要 房屋分配规则应灵活应对代理人偏好的变化。我们提出了这种灵活性的具体概念。如果规则为她分配了该配置文件中的一所房子，而当她报告的偏好只是简单地交换两者的位置时，则将另一所房子分配给她，则称代理对具有偏好配置文件的一对房屋具有交换主权房屋。如果规则在他们一起报告这样的“交换偏好”时交换他们的分配，则说一对代理对他们在配置文件中的分配具有相互交换主权。如果任何一对房屋具有互换主权代理，则分配规则是单独互换的；如果任何一对房屋具有互换主权代理或相互互换主权代理，则分配规则是相互互换的。我们为房地产市场证明，最高交易周期规则是独特的策略证明、个人理性和相互互换灵活的规则。在房屋分配问题中，我们表明基于队列的优先级规则具有独特的策略证明、单独交换灵活和嫉妒非专横。改变非专制的强度，我们描述了顺序优先级规则（另外非专制）和序列优先级规则（另外配对非专制和配对主权）的重要子类。