Centre for Development Economics
and
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR
Resource Allocation in a Network
by
Rajnish Kumar
Queen’s University, Belfast
Thesday, 11th November 2014 at 3:00 PM
Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
All are cordially invited
Abstract
A fi xed amount of resource must be divided to a group of agents connected in a social network. Agents care about how much resource they receive as well as how much resource their friends receive. We study the case where the planner has little to no information about the network. The paper is divided into two parts. In the fi rst part, we study the scenario where the planner has the ability to ask agents to report their connections to other agents. In this scenario agents may have the incentive to game the system by lying about their connections. Therefore, we study mechanisms that incentivize agents to report their true connections (strategy-proofness). We focus on strategyproof mechanisms that work for a wide range of utility functions, thus making the analysis robust.
In the second part, we study the scenario where the planner cannot elicit the connections of the agents, perhaps due to privacy concerns. We set up a non-cooperative game that allows a more effi cient allocation of the resource. We analyze the efficiency gains achieved when the planner has the ability to ask agents information compared to when the planner cannot elicit information from agents.