Efficient, Fair, and Incentive-Compatible Healthcare Rationing

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, fair and efficient rationing of healthcare resources has emerged as an important issue that has been discussed by medical experts, policy-makers, and the general public. We consider a healthcare rationing problem where medical units are to be allocated to patients. Each unit is reserved for one of several categories and the patients have different priorities for the categories. We present an allocation rule that respects the priorities, complies with the eligibility requirements, allocates the largest feasible number of units, and does not incentivize agents to hide that they qualify through a category. Moreover, the rule is polynomial-time computable. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first known rule with the aforementioned properties.