Incentive compatible allocation and exchange of discrete resources

Marek Pycia and Utku Unver

Theoretical Economics, 2017, vol. 12, issue 1

Abstract: The allocation and exchange of discrete resources, such as transplant organs, public housing, dormitory rooms, and many other resources for which agents have single-unit demand, is often conducted via direct mechanisms without monetary transfers. Incentive compatibility and efficiency are primary concerns when designing such mechanisms. We construct the full class of group strategy-proof and Pareto efficient mechanisms and show that each of them can be implemented by endowing agents with control rights over resources. This new class, which we call trading cycles, contains new mechanisms as well as known mechanisms such as top trading cycles, serial dictatorships, and hierarchical exchange. We illustrate how one can use our construction to show what can and what cannot be achieved in a variety of allocation and exchange problems, and we provide an example in which the new trading-cycles mechanisms are more Lorenz equitable than all previously known mechanisms.

Keywords: Group strategy-proofness; Pareto efficiency; matching; no-transfer allocation and exchange; single-unit demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econtheory.org/ojs/index.php/te/article/viewFile/20170287/17051/516 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Incentive Compatible Allocation and Exchange of Discrete Resources (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:the:publsh:2201

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Economics is currently edited by Simon Board, Todd D. Sarver, Juuso Toikka, Rakesh Vohra, Pierre-Olivier Weill

More articles in Theoretical Economics from Econometric Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin J. Osborne ().