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...

In a Vickrey auction, if one bidder can invest to increase his value, the combined mechanism including investments is still fully optimal. By contrast, for any β 1, there exist monotone allocation rules that guarantee a fraction β of the allocative optimum in the worst case, but such that the...

Many scarce public resources are allocated at below-market-clearing prices, and sometimes for free. Such "non-market" mechanisms necessarily sacrifice some surplus, yet they can potentially improve equity. In this paper, we develop a model of mechanism design with redistributive concerns. Agents...

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...

We propose an economic framework for determining priority rules for allocating a scarce supply of vaccines that gradually become available during a public health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the designer maximizes a...