🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the design of mechanisms for efficiently allocating heterogeneous tasks when agents possess private preferences and may retain tasks. Focusing on delegated mechanisms that satisfy obvious strategyproofness (OSP), the work provides the first characterization of the structural properties of OSP mechanisms in multidimensional task allocation settings and reveals how agents’ discretion in task selection affects the principal’s efficiency. Through rigorous analysis grounded in mechanism design theory and game theory, the paper identifies precise conditions under which the principal benefits from employing OSP mechanisms. These findings offer both theoretical justification and practical guidance for selecting and designing OSP-compliant mechanisms in real-world applications where incentive compatibility and simplicity are critical.
📝 Abstract
A principal must allocate a set of heterogeneous tasks (or objects) among multiple agents. The principal has preferences over the allocation. Each agent has preferences over which tasks they are assigned, which are their private information. The principal is constrained by the fact that each agent has the right to demand some status-quo task assignment. I characterize the conditions under which the principal can gain by delegating some control over the assignment to the agents. Within a large class of delegation mechanisms, I then characterize those that are obviously strategy-proof (OSP), and provide guidance for choosing among OSP mechanisms.