Fair Allocation of Vaccines, Ventilators and Antiviral Treatments: Leaving No Ethical Value Behind in Health Care Rationing

Pathak, Parag A.; Sönmez, Tayfun; Ünver, M. Utku; Yenmez, M. Bumin

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.00374

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(78 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…7 Sönmez and Yenmez (2020) further extend this analysis for field applications with position heterogeneity. Other related papers on reserve systems include Hafalir, Yenmez, and Yildirim (2013), Aygün and Turhan (2020), Pathak, Sönmez, Ünver, and Yenmez (2020), Delacrétaz (2020), and Aygün and Bo (2021).…”

Section: Relation To Literature On Market Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms

Pathak¹,

Sönmez²

2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 2005, the U.S. Congress legislated that the H-1B visa program create 20,000 annual slots reserved for advanced-degree applicants. Since then, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) has used visa allocation rules that comply with this legislation. Following a directive in the April 2017 Buy American and Hire American Executive Order by President Trump, USCIS tweaked its H-1B visa allocation rule in 2019. While remaining in compliance with the legislation set forth in 2005, the USCIS estimated that the 2019 rule change would increase the number of higher-skill awards by more than 5,000 annually at the expense of lower-skill awards. The rule change was explicitly engineered for this objective. In this paper we characterize all visa allocation rules that comply with the 2005 legislation and use this framework to analyze the rules that have been deployed in the interim. Despite specifying rigid caps, we show that the legislation permits a range of rules that can change the number of high-skill awards by as many as 14,000 in an average year. Of all rules that comply with the legislation, the 2019 rule adopted by the Trump administration maximizes the rate of high-skill awards and minimizes the rate of low-skill awards. However, two previous and relatively unknown changes to the H-1B visa allocation rule resulted in more substantial changes to this distribution. These earlier reforms, however, were motivated by logistical considerations, potentially without understanding of their distributional consequences.

show abstract

Section: Relation To Literature On Market Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms

Pathak¹,

Sönmez²

2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Courses have limited capacity, and slots are often allocated via a centralized mechanism. More broadly, analogous problems also surface in numerous areas of social concern, such as the distribution of vaccines to hospitals (Pathak et al, 2021), the allocation of educational resources, and access to infrastructure such as transport, water, and electricity (Burmann et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

For One and All: Individual and Group Fairness in the Allocation of Indivisible Goods

Scarlett¹,

Teh²,

Zick³

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Fair allocation of indivisible goods is a well-explored problem. Traditionally, research focused on individual fairness -are individual agents satisfied with their allotted share? -and group fairness -are groups of agents treated fairly? In this paper, we explore the coexistence of individual envy-freeness (i-EF) and its group counterpart, group weighted envy-freeness (g-WEF), in the allocation of indivisible goods. We propose several polynomial-time algorithms that provably achieve i-EF and g-WEF simultaneously in various degrees of approximation under three different conditions on the agents' (i) when agents have identical additive valuation functions, i-EFX and g-WEF1 can be achieved simultaneously; (ii) when agents within a group share a common valuation function, an allocation satisfying both i-EF1 and g-WEF1 exists; and (iii) when agents' valuations for goods within a group differ, we show that while maintaining i-EF1, we can achieve a 1 3 -approximation to ex-ante g-WEF1. Our results thus provide a first step towards connecting individual and group fairness in the allocation of indivisible goods, in hopes of its useful application to domains requiring the reconciliation of diversity with individual demands.

show abstract

“…I contribute to the literature on the economics of pandemic and health management, which has been rapidly growing since the outbreak of COVID-19. One important issue is how to allocate scarce medical resources (e.g., Akbarpour et al 2021;Grigoryan 2021;Pathak et al 2020). Guo and Xu (2022) show that more equal consumption of antipandemic resources can improve efficiency.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Credibility of Communication in a Pandemic

Guo¹

2023

Journal of Marketing Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social distancing measures are typically recommended to contain the spread of infectious diseases. To improve the public's voluntary compliance, governments and health authorities seek to publicize timely information about the pandemic. Yet social planners may exaggerate or downplay their private information about the disease's severity to elicit their preferred level of social distancing. This is because the relative weight they assign to the costs of isolation over public health may be unbalanced, and people may not fully take into account how their social distancing may influence others' infection risk. Consequently, messages and claims about the pandemic may be distrusted. We investigate whether and when communication can be fully or partially credible despite apparent incentives for misrepresentation. We find that in equilibrium a government would communicate truthfully, if and only if the disease severity levels are not too close to each other in the public's prior belief. Nevertheless, an increasing difference between the severity levels need not enhance the credibility of communication. A higher communication credibility may hurt social welfare. Moreover, as the government becomes more concerned about the costs of social distancing, its equilibrium messages may become more or less trustworthy. Our results can benefit social planners and users of their messages (e.g., analysts, researchers, investors).

show abstract

Fair Allocation of Vaccines, Ventilators and Antiviral Treatments: Leaving No Ethical Value Behind in Health Care Rationing

Cited by 3 publications

References 52 publications

Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms

Immigration Lottery Design: Engineered and Coincidental Consequences of H-1B Reforms

For One and All: Individual and Group Fairness in the Allocation of Indivisible Goods

The Credibility of Communication in a Pandemic

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About