Speaker: Nick Arnosti (Columbia Business School, New York)
Title: Lotteries for Shared Experiences
Abstract: We consider a setting where tickets for an experience are awarded by lottery. Each agent belongs to a group, and will only participate in the experience if accompanied by others in their group. The most widespread mechanism in practice is to allow agents to request multiple tickets (up to some maximum). Agents are then ordered uniformly at random and sequentially allocated tickets until none remain. We show that this approach may result in unfair and inefficient outcomes. One alternative is to ask agents to report their groups and conduct a lottery by group. This is approximately fair and approximately efficient, but verifying identities of each group member may be too cumbersome for many applications. Instead, we propose allowing agents to request any number of tickets, but biasing the lottery against agents with large requests. We show that this approach approximates the group lottery, and therefore leads to outcomes that are approximately fair and approximately efficient.
Bio: Prof. Nick Arnosti, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia Business School, Ney York, U.S.A. He received a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 2016. His research focuses on the allocation of "social goods" which are given away, rather than sold to maximize profit. Examples include seats in public schools, affordable housing, permits for hiking and hunting, and discounted event tickets.
