Acceptable and Walrasian allocations

The paper provides an axiomatic approach to mechanisms which determine the individuals' 'contributions' to the total welfare of society, for every fin ite pure exchange economy and for every allocation of the total resources. An efficient allocation is acceptable if it induces individual contribution s that are not lower than the respective contributions with the initial all ocation. We characterize the mechanism that satisfies our axioms, and in ad dition guarantees the existence of an acceptable allocation for every econo my. We then show that the set of acceptable allocations (with respect to th is mechanism) coincides with the set of Walrasian allocations with respect to the initial allocation. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserv ed.