Manna from Heaven or Forty Years in the Desert: Optimal Allocation Without Transfer Payments

18 Pages Posted: 24 Oct 2006

See all articles by Surajeet Chakravarty

Surajeet Chakravarty

University of Exeter Business School

Todd R. Kaplan

University of Exeter Business School - Department of Economics; University of Haifa - Department of Economics

Date Written: October 2006

Abstract

Often an organization, government or entity must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs or discriminating among agents is not an option. In this paper, we search for 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 show that for a large class of distributions of valuations, ignoring these costly signals by giving agents equal share (or using lotteries if the goods are indivisible) maximizes the social surplus. 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.

Keywords: Mechanism Design, Lotteries

JEL Classification: C70, D44, D89

Suggested Citation

Chakravarty, Surajeet and Kaplan, Todd R., Manna from Heaven or Forty Years in the Desert: Optimal Allocation Without Transfer Payments (October 2006). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=939389 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.939389

Surajeet Chakravarty

University of Exeter Business School ( email )

Xfi Building, Rennes Dr.
Exeter, EX4 4JH
United Kingdom

Todd R. Kaplan (Contact Author)

University of Exeter Business School - Department of Economics ( email )

Streatham Court
Exeter, EX4 4RJ
United Kingdom
+44 13 9226 3237 (Phone)

University of Haifa - Department of Economics

Haifa 31905
Israel