Efficient, Fair, and Incentive-Compatible Healthcare Rationing

Abstract: Rationing of healthcare resources has emerged as an important issue, which has been discussed by medical experts, policy-makers, and the general public. We consider a rationing problem where medical units are to be allocated to patients. Each unit is reserved for one of several categories and each category has a priority ranking of the patients. 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. The rule characterizes all possible allocations that satisfy the first three properties and is polynomial-time computable.