Hi I'm Morimitsu Kurino a professor in the Faculty of Economics at Keio University.
My research field is market design, which is concerned with the creation of a venue
in which buyers and sellers meet, and the format through which they interact.
In my research, I'm working with my colleagues on online booking systems, or allocation of
slots for public services. Think about what happens when demand is bigger than supply.
For ordinary goods such as ice cream the price will go up until the demand
is equal to the supply. However, for the public services because they are
free of charge, the price cannot adjust the balance of demand and supply.
In this case, the first-come, first-served system is usually used in our society. Let's
take a look at booking appointments for Covid-19 vaccinations as an example. The first-come,
first-served system is used in most countries. But in this system we observe two harmful effects. One
is access concentration, because everyone's optimal strategy is to apply at the start. Another
is scalping. Scalpers quickly book slots with a help of bots by using fake names.
They cancel slots and rebook them under customers' names for selling. There is
a lot of evidence observed. For example, here is what happened to the Irish immigration services.
You can see queues and scalping was observed. I proposed a new system, called the lottery
batch system. We first set the time interval for collecting applications. Then the first step is
that applicants submit their preference lists over slots. The second is to rank applicants randomly.
The last is to select an assignment in a way that applicants successfully pick their favorite slots.
The advantage of this system comes from the fact that it eliminates the importance of speed this
is because applicants have the same chances of getting slots, independent of when they apply.
Thus, access concentration is relieved. Moreover, no applicants benefits from using scalpers,
and thus scalping is not profitable anymore. The result will be fair in the sense that
every applicant has the same chance. In sum when demand exceeds supply, the familiar fast-come,
first-served system does not work properly, but the proposed locally batch system works well.
you