Redistribution Through Markets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dworczak, Piotr; Kominers, Scott Duke; Akbarpour, Mohammad
• 署名单位: Northwestern University; Harvard University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: ECONOMETRICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0012-9682
• DOI: 10.3982/ECTA16671
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 1665-1698
• 关键词: minimum-wage; public provision; optimal taxation; private goods; INEQUALITY; mechanisms; transfers; auctions; POLICY; cash

摘要

Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private information about both their valuations for an indivisible object and their marginal utilities for money. The planner seeks a mechanism that maximizes agents' total utilities, subject to incentive and market-clearing constraints. We uncover the constrained Pareto frontier by identifying the optimal trade-off between allocative efficiency and redistribution. We find that competitive-equilibrium allocation is not always optimal. Instead, when there is inequality across sides of the market, the optimal design uses a tax-like mechanism, introducing a wedge between the buyer and seller prices, and redistributing the resulting surplus to the poorer side of the market via lump-sum payments. When there is significant same-side inequality that can be uncovered by market behavior, it may be optimal to impose price controls even though doing so induces rationing.