Characterizations of Pareto-efficient, fair, andstrategy-proof allocation rules in queueing problems

A set of agents with possibly different waiting costs have to receive the same service one after theother. Efficiency requires to maximize total welfare. Equity requires to at least treat equal agentsequally. One must form a queue, set up monetary transfers to compensate agents having to wait,and not a priori arbitrarily exclude agents from positions. As one may not know agents’ waitingcosts, they may have no incentive to reveal them. We identify the only rule satisfying Paretoefficiency,a weak equity axiom as equal treatment of equals in welfare or symmetry, and strategyproofness.It satisfies stronger axioms, as no-envy and anonymity. Further, its desirability extendsto related problems. To obtain these results, we prove that even non-single-valued rules satisfyPareto-efficiency of queues and strategy-proofness if and only if they select Pareto-efficient queuesand set transfers in the spirit of Groves (1973). This holds in other problems, provided the domainof quasi-linear preferences is rich enough....