Susanne Goldlücke, University of Konstanz: "The Multiple-Volunteers Principle"
(Joint with Thomas Tröger)
We consider mechanisms for assigning an unpleasant task among a group of agents with heterogenous abilities. We emphasize threshold rules: every agent decides whether or not to "volunteer"; if the number of volunteers exceeds a threshold number, the task is assigned to a random volunteer; if the number is below the threshold, the task is assigned to a random non-volunteer. We show that within the class of binary-action mechanisms, some threshold rule is optimal. While in general the first best cannot be attained in this setting, it can be approximated arbitrarily closely with a threshold rule as the group size tends to infinity.