No Screening is More Efficient with Multiple Objects

The paper investigates welfare‑maximizing allocation of heterogeneous objects when agents use costly effort for screening instead of monetary transfers. It shows that as the number of object types increases, no‑screening mechanisms become more efficient, reducing the need for screening. The authors prove that in a symmetric continuous market with i.i.d. log‑concave values, the multidimensional allocation problem collapses to a single‑dimensional one based on agents’ best‑option values, and they demonstrate that this no‑screening optimality persists even as variety expands, supported by large‑variety limits and numerical experiments. The findings are applied to design an invitation‑based vaccine appointment system.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

• agents