Assignment Mechanisms with Public Preferences and Independent Types

Abstract

The literature on delegation considers the problem of an uninformed decision maker and an informed but biased agent. I extend that analyis to the case of multiple agents under two assumptions: independent private information and public preferences. In the optimal mechanism, agents assign points to the various alternatives, which then get mapped into scores, so that the alternative with the largest score wins. Each alternative's score is the sum of points received plus an extra term that is larger when the agents who have a strong preference for that alternative assign points to the alternatives they like less.