Publications
Publications
- June 2024
- Journal of Political Economy
Redistributive Allocation Mechanisms
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers
Abstract
Many scarce public resources are allocated at below-market-clearing prices, and sometimes for free. Such "non-market" mechanisms sacrifice some surplus, yet they can potentially improve equity. We develop a model of mechanism design with redistributive concerns. Agents are characterized by a privately observed willingness to pay for quality, a publicly observed label, and a social welfare weight. A market designer controls allocation and pricing of a set of objects of heterogeneous quality, and maximizes the expectation of a welfare function. The designer does not directly observe individuals' social welfare weights. We derive structural insights about the form of the optimal mechanism, leading to a framework for determining how and when to use non-market mechanisms. The key determinant is the strength of the statistical correlation of the unobserved social welfare weights with the label and the willingness to pay that the designer can, respectively, directly observe or elicit through the mechanism.
Keywords
Citation
Akbarpour, Mohammad, Piotr Dworczak, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Redistributive Allocation Mechanisms." Journal of Political Economy 132, no. 6 (June 2024): 1831–1875. (Authors' names are in certified random order.)