Related papers: Chaos and Misallocation under Price Controls
We study the trade-off between envy and inefficiency in repeated resource allocation settings with stochastic replenishments, motivated by real-world systems such as food banks and medical supply chains. Specifically, we consider a model in…
In this paper we study the problem of allocating a scarce resource among several players (or agents). A central decision maker wants to maximize the total utility of all agents. However, such a solution may be unfair for one or more agents…
We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after…
In the allocation of resources to a set of agents, how do fairness guarantees impact the social welfare? A quantitative measure of this impact is the price of fairness, which measures the worst-case loss of social welfare due to fairness…
In auction and matching markets, estimating the welfare effects of demand-side treatments is challenging because of spillovers through the mechanism. We develop a quasi-experimental approach that avoids parametric assumptions typically…
We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting that models the assignment of papers to reviewers. A recurring issue in allocation problems is the compatibility of welfare/efficiency and fairness. Given an oracle to find a…
In the General Theory, Keynes remarked that the economy's state depends on expectations, and that these expectations can be subject to sudden swings. In this work, we develop a multiple equilibria behavioural business cycle model that can…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
In multiagent systems, the complex interaction of fixed incentives can lead agents to outcomes that are poor (inefficient) not only for the group, but also for each individual. Price of anarchy is a technical, game-theoretic definition that…
The productivity of a common pool of resources may degrade when overly exploited by a number of selfish investors, a situation known as the tragedy of the commons (TOC). Without regulations, agents optimize the size of their individual…
We study competitive equilibria in exchange economies when a continuum of goods is conflated into a finite set of commodities. The design of conflation choices affects the allocation of scarce resources among agents, by constraining trading…
Price of anarchy quantifies the degradation of social welfare in games due to the lack of a centralized authority that can enforce the optimal outcome. At its antipodes, mechanism design studies how to ameliorate these effects by…
Chaos is widely understood as being a consequence of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. This is the result of an instability in phase space, which separates trajectories exponentially. Here, we demonstrate that this criterion…
Congestion pricing has received lots of attention in scientific discussion. Congestion pricing means that the operator increases prices at the time of congestion and the traffic demand are expected to decrease. In a certain sense, shadow…
Resource allocation problems are a fundamental domain in which to evaluate the fairness properties of algorithms. The trade-offs between fairness and utilization have a long history in this domain. A recent line of work has considered…
In the era of a growing population, systemic changes to the world, and the rising risk of crises, humanity has been facing an unprecedented challenge of resource scarcity. Confronting and addressing the issues concerning the scarce…
We study equilibria of markets with $m$ heterogeneous indivisible goods and $n$ consumers with combinatorial preferences. It is well known that a competitive equilibrium is not guaranteed to exist when valuations are not gross substitutes.…
The well-known Braess paradox in congestion games states that adding an additional road to a transportation network may increase the total travel time, and consequently decrease the overall efficiency. Motivated by this, this paper presents…
We study the efficiency of mechanisms for allocating a divisible resource. Given scalar signals submitted by all users, such a mechanism decides the fraction of the resource that each user will receive and a payment that will be collected…
Chaos, in quantum systems, can be diagnosed by certain out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) that obey the chaos bound of Maldacena, Shenker, and Stanford (MSS). We begin by deriving a dispersion relation for this class of OTOCs, implying…