Instead of charging money, we could give things out more fairly just by making the 'right' to use them expire really fast.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Dynamic Mechanism Design with Expiring Allocation Rights: Screening, Equilibrium Timing, and Decentralized Public-Good Provision
SSRN · 6200218
The Takeaway
This study shows that 'temporal scarcity'—the threat of losing a spot if you don't act immediately—is a powerful non-price screening tool. It forces people to reveal how much they actually need a service without requiring any monetary payment, allowing for fairer distribution without the downsides of a waitlist.
From the abstract
We study a dynamic mechanism in which agents are endowed with indivisible, non-transferable allocation rights that must be exercised before a deterministic deadline. Waiting increases the probability of losing the right and generates an increasing shadow cost of delay. We show that expiration creates a dynamic single-crossing property: as time approaches the deadline, the relative value of acting early rises sharply, eliminating incentives for strategic delay. In equilibrium, agents follow uniqu