Strategic and Normative Analysis of Resource Allocation Problems

肾脏的分配、国会的分配、互联网的定价，以及医疗实习生与医院住院医师项目的匹配，这些都是我们日常生活中面临的情况，现代经济理论可以帮助我们以一种比几年前更令人满意的方式解决这些问题。这个项目关注的是为这些问题找到“好的”解决方案。作者解决了两类问题：经济正义的规范性问题（谁应该支付，支付多少？）什么是公平？以及激励的战略问题（我们如何为自利的经济主体提供激励，使其按照社会利益行事？）。在这项研究中，出发点是确定决策程序的理想属性。对于每一类特定的问题，作者研究了这些性质的限制程度。在实践中使用的规则满足这些属性吗？如果不是，是否存在满足这些属性的规则？是否可以得到满足这些性质的所有规则的完整描述？其中，有一些比其他的好吗？这种方法适用于几类问题：分配稀缺资源；调度和排序问题；时间问题；以及分配的问题。利用过去几年在方法论上取得的巨大进步，这个项目的目标是确定做出所有经济主体都认为公平的决策的方法，并为他们提供正确的参与激励。

Allocating kidneys, apportionment in Congress, pricing the internet, and matching of medical interns to hospitals for residency programs are all examples of situations that we face in our daily life, and that modern economic theory can help us solve in a much more satisfactory way than would have been possible just a few years ago. This project is concerned with finding ``good` solutions to such problems. The author addresses two kinds of issues: normative issues of economic justice (Who should pay, and how much? What is fair?); and strategic issues of incentives (How can we provide self- interested economic agents the incentive to behave in accordance with the good of society?). In this research the point of departure then is to identify desirable properties of decision procedures. For each specific class of problems, the author investigates how restrictive the properties are. Do the rules that are used in practice satisfy these properties? If not, are there rules that do satisfy these properties? Can a complete description of all the rules satisfying the properties be obtained? Among them, are some better than others? This methodology is applied to several classes of problems: allocating scarce resources; scheduling and sequencing problems; problems of timing; and problems of allocation over time. Exploiting the considerable methodological advances of the last few years, the goal of this project is to identify methods of reaching decisions that all economic agents find fair and that provide them with the right incentives to participate.