TY - JOUR
T1 - How to avoid black markets for appointments with online booking systems
AU - Hakimov, Rustamdjan
AU - Heller, C. Philipp
AU - Kübler, Dorothea
AU - Kurino, Morimitsu
N1 - Funding Information:
* Hakimov: University of Lausanne & WZB Berlin Social Science Center (email: rustamdjan.hakimov@unil. ch); Heller: NERA Economic Consulting (email: philipp.heller@nera.com); Kübler: WZB Berlin Social Science Center & Technical University Berlin (email: dorothea.kuebler@wzb.eu); Kurino: Keio University, Faculty of Economics (email: kurino@econ.keio.ac.jp). Liran Einav was the coeditor for this article. We would like to thank three anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments and clear guidance. Our special thanks go to Renke Fahl-Spiewack at the German Foreign Office who inspired us to work on this problem. We are grateful to Nina Bonge who helped us with conducting the experiments as well as Jennifer Rontganger and Christopher Eyer for copyediting. We thank Georgy Artemov, Péter Biró, Julien Combe, Bob Hammond, Akshay Arun Moorthy, Alex Nichifor, Siqi Pan, Antonio Romero-Medina, Yasunari Tamada, Masatoshi Tsumagari, Martin Van der Linden, Suvi Vasama, Tom Wilkening, Zhibo Xu, and participants of the Berlin Behavioral Economics Workshop, the European Behavioral Economics Meeting (EBEM) at the University of Bonn, the Conference of Behavioral Economics and the Economics of Inequality at the University of Edinburgh, and seminar participants at Keio University, Hitotsubashi University, UTS Sydney, University of Melbourne, University of St. Andrews, ECONtribute Bonn/Cologne, HSE St. Petersburg, DICE at Düsseldorf University, the MiddEX virtual seminar, and FAIR at the University of Bergen for their valuable comments. Dorothea Kübler gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through CRC TRR 190 “Rationality and Competition” and the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (EXC 2055) as well as the Leibniz SAW project MADEP. Rustamdjan Hakimov acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation project 100018_189152. Morimitsu Kurino acknowledges financial support from JPS KAKENHI (grant from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), and F-MIRAI at the University of Tsukuba.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Economic Association. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - Allocating appointment slots is presented as a new application for market design. Online booking systems are commonly used by public authorities to allocate appointments for visa interviews, driver's licenses, passport renewals, etc. We document that black markets for appointments have developed in many parts of the world. Scalpers book the appointments that are offered for free and sell the slots to appointment seekers. We model the existing first-come-first-served booking system and propose an alternative batch system. The batch system collects applications for slots over a certain time period and then randomly allocates slots to applicants. The theory predicts and lab experiments confirm that scalpers profitably book and sell slots under the current system with sufficiently high demand, but that they are not active in the proposed batch system. We discuss practical issues for the implementation of the batch system and its applicability to other markets with scalping.
AB - Allocating appointment slots is presented as a new application for market design. Online booking systems are commonly used by public authorities to allocate appointments for visa interviews, driver's licenses, passport renewals, etc. We document that black markets for appointments have developed in many parts of the world. Scalpers book the appointments that are offered for free and sell the slots to appointment seekers. We model the existing first-come-first-served booking system and propose an alternative batch system. The batch system collects applications for slots over a certain time period and then randomly allocates slots to applicants. The theory predicts and lab experiments confirm that scalpers profitably book and sell slots under the current system with sufficiently high demand, but that they are not active in the proposed batch system. We discuss practical issues for the implementation of the batch system and its applicability to other markets with scalping.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85109882531&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85109882531&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1257/aer.20191204
DO - 10.1257/aer.20191204
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85109882531
SN - 0002-8282
VL - 111
SP - 2127
EP - 2151
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
IS - 7
ER -