Designing rotation programs: Limits and possibilities

Rotation programs are widely used in our society. For instance, a job rotation program is an HR strategy where employees rotate between two or more jobs in the same business. We study rotation programs within the standard implementation framework under complete information. We introduce the notion of implementation in ordered cycles, where each ordered cycle is a rotation program for an assignment problem. When the designer would like to attain a Pareto efficient goal, we provide sufficient conditions for its implementation in ordered cycles. However, when, for instance, every employee transitions through all different lateral jobs before rotating back to his original one, the conditions fully characterize the class of Pareto efficient goals that are implementable in ordered cycles.