Simple and (Approximately) Optimal Mechanism in Efficiency and Equality Tradeoff

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Chen, Zhou; Qi, Qi; Wang, Changjun; Wang, Zhen
• 署名单位: Southeast University - China; Renmin University of China; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Academy of Mathematics & System Sciences, CAS; Shanghai University of Finance & Economics; Shanghai University of Finance & Economics
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.02785
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: public goods allocation; hybrid mechanism; EFFICIENCY; EQUALITY; first auction then lottery

摘要

Many large cities have adopted a policy of restricting the number of new vehicle licenses in order to address the challenges of traffic and air pollution problems. An important question that then arises is how to allocate these limited new license quotas among a large set of demanders while taking both social efficiency and equality into consideration. Inspired by this practical problem, we study the problem of designing simple and optimal mechanisms to tradeoff between efficiency and equality in a similar public goods allocation problem. We first propose a truthful two-group mechanism framework that is both general and simple and then use it to compute the optimal solution that maximizes social efficiency while guaranteeing a certain level of equality. Interestingly and surprisingly, under some natural conditions regarding the players' private values, we show that the optimal mechanisms within the proposed framework are always the mechanisms that first run an auction and then run a lottery (ATL for short). In addition, beyond the framework and those conditions, we prove that the ATL mechanism can always guarantee at least 1 - c + c2 (c is an element of [0,1] is the minimum equality level) of the optimal solution efficiency. This approximation ratio can in practice be further improved to near-optimal when resources are scarce and the natural conditions hold. We further establish a theoretical connection between these natural conditions and common value distributions, demonstrating that these conditions are widely satisfied in practice. Finally, we implement several experiments to verify the ATL mechanism's optimality and robustness.