Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Optimal Allocation without Transfer Payments

Chakravarty, Surajeet and Kaplan, Todd R. (2006): Optimal Allocation without Transfer Payments.

[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_18481.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_18481.pdf

Download (297kB) | Preview

Abstract

Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs or when discriminating among agents using known differences is not a viable option. In this paper, we find an optimal mechanism to allocate goods when the designer is benevolent. While the designer cannot charge agents, he can receive a costly but wasteful signal from them. We find conditions for which ignoring these costly signals by giving agents equal share (or using lotteries if the goods are indivisible) is optimal. In other cases, those that send the highest signal should receive the goods; however, we then show that there exist cases where more complicated mechanisms are superior. Finally, we show that the optimal mechanism is independent of the scarcity of the goods being allocated.

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.