Redistributive Allocation Mechanisms

Scott Duke Kominers

How marketplace designers can think about the tradeoffs between efficiency and equity.

Many scarce public resources are allocated at below-market-clearing prices, and sometimes for free. These “non-market” mechanisms sacrifice some surplus, yet they can potentially improve equity. In this talk, Scott Kominers (a16z crypto research, Harvard Business School) presents a model of mechanism design with redistributive concerns with many applications.