Mechanism design with budget constraints and a population of agents

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Richter, Michael
• 署名单位: University of London; Royal Holloway University London
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.02.009
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 30-47
• 关键词: Mechanism design; Welfare maximization; revenue maximization; budget constraints; Continuum economy

摘要

This paper finds welfare- and revenue-maximizing mechanisms for assigning a divisible good to a population of budget-constrained agents who have independently distributed private valuations and budgets without unit-demand. Both optimal mechanisms feature a linear price for the good. The welfare-maximizing mechanism additionally has a uniform lump-sum transfer to all agents and a higher linear price than the revenue-maximizing mechanism. This transfer increases welfare because it ameliorates the key difficulty in the aforementioned setting: agents with high valuations cannot purchase an efficient amount of the good due to their budget constraints. Finally, in an extension, I relax the independence between valuations and budgets. In an online appendix, I consider production and large finite markets. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.