English

Risk Sharing Among Many: Implementing a Subgame Perfect and Optimal Equilibrium

Theoretical Economics 2026-03-03 v5

Abstract

Can a welfare-maximising risk-sharing rule be implemented in a large, decentralised community? We revisit the price-and-choose (P&C) mechanism of Echenique and N\'u\~nez (2025), in which players post price schedules sequentially and the last mover selects an allocation. P&C implements every Pareto-optimal allocation when the choice set is finite, but realistic risk-sharing problems involve an infinite continuum of feasible allocations. We extend P&C to infinite menus by modelling each allocation as a bounded random vector that redistributes an aggregate loss X=iXiX=\sum_i X_i. We prove that the extended mechanism still implements the allocation that maximises aggregate (monetary) utility, even when players entertain heterogeneous credal sets of finitely additive probabilities (charges) dominated by a reference probability P\mathbb{P}. Our credal sets are weak^{\ast}-compact and are restricted so that utility functionals are uniformly Lipschitz on the feasible set. Finally, we pair P&C with the first-mover auction of Echenique and N\'u\~nez (2025), adapted to our infinite-menu, multiple-prior environment. Under complete information about players' credal sets, the auction equalises the surplus among participants. The result is a decentralised, enforcement-free procedure that achieves both optimal and fair risk sharing under heterogeneous priors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.04122,
  title  = {Risk Sharing Among Many: Implementing a Subgame Perfect and Optimal Equilibrium},
  author = {Michiko Ogaku},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.04122},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:23:57.839Z