Related papers: Screening with damages and ordeals
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
A designer distributes goods while considering the perceived equity of the resulting allocation. Such concerns are modeled through an equity constraint requiring that equally deserving agents receive equal allocations. I ask what forms of…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
We formulate and study the algorithmic mechanism design problem for a general class of resource allocation settings, where the center redistributes the private resources brought by individuals. Money transfer is forbidden. Distinct from the…
When allocating indivisible objects via lottery, planners often use ordinal mechanisms, which elicit agents' rankings of objects rather than their full preferences over lotteries. In such an ordinal informational environment, planners…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…
The rise of machine learning has shifted targeted resource allocation in policy and humanitarian settings toward algorithmic targeting based on predicted risk scores. This approach is typically cheaper and faster than traditional screening…
We consider the allocation of indivisible objects among agents with different valuations, which can be positive or negative. An egalitarian allocation is an allocation that maximizes the smallest value given to an agent; finding such an…
We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
Reallocating resources to get mutually beneficial outcomes is a fundamental problem in various multi-agent settings. While finding an arbitrary Pareto optimal allocation is generally easy, checking whether a particular allocation is Pareto…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…
In fair division of indivisible goods, using sequences of sincere choices (or picking sequences) is a natural way to allocate the objects. The idea is as follows: at each stage, a designated agent picks one object among those that remain.…
In many applications such as rationing medical care and supplies, university admissions, and the assignment of public housing, the decision of who receives an allocation can be justified by various normative criteria. Such settings have…
A collection of objects, some of which are good and some are bad, is to be divided fairly among agents with different tastes, modeled by additive utility functions. If the objects cannot be shared, so that each of them must be entirely…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
A screening instrument is costly if it is socially wasteful and productive otherwise. A principal screens an agent with multidimensional private information and quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across two components: a…
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…