Dynamic assignment without money: Optimality of spot mechanisms
Combe J. Nora V. Tercieux O.
January 2025Society for Economic Theory
Theoretical Economics
2025#20Issue 1255 - 301 pp.
We study a large market model of dynamic matching with no monetary transfers and a continuum of agents who have to be assigned items at each date. When the social planner can only elicit ordinal agents preferences, we prove that under a mild regularity assumption, incentive compatible and ordinally efficient allocation rules coincide with spot mechanisms. The latter specify “virtual prices” for items at each date and, for each agent, randomly select a budget of virtual money at the beginning of time. When the social planner can elicit cardinal preferences, we prove that under a similar regularity assumption, incentive compatible and Pareto efficient mechanisms coincide with spot menu of random budgets mechanisms. These are similar to spot mechanisms except that, at the beginning of time, each agent chooses within a menu, a distribution over budget of virtual money. Copyright
C61 , C78 , course allocation , D47 , D61 , dynamic matching , Market design
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CREST, Ecole Polytechnique, IP Paris, France
Department of Economics, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan
Paris School of Economics, France
CNRS, France
CREST
Department of Economics
Paris School of Economics
CNRS
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