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Olivier Tercieux

Publications and source records attributed to Olivier Tercieux.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Top Trading Cycles in Large Markets: The Asymptotic Irrelevance of Priorities

Top Trading Cycles (TTC) is Pareto efficient and strategy-proof and explicitly uses agents' priorities. Although TTC favors higher-priority agents in each round, we show that this priority advantage vanishes as the market grows large under a canonical random model of preferences and priorities. In the limit, TTC produces assignments with virtually the same incidence of justified envy as Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) -- a mechanism entirely blind to priorities. This stark asymptotic equivalence implies that TTC effectively fails to satisfy standard fairness criteria in large markets, casting significant doubt on its practical appeal for balancing efficiency and fairness.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2023

Optimal Queue Design

We study the optimal method for rationing scarce resources through a queue system. The designer controls agents' entry into a queue and their exit, their service priority -- or queueing discipline -- as well as their information about queue priorities, while providing them with the incentive to join the queue and, importantly, to stay in the queue, when recommended by the designer. Under a mild condition, the optimal mechanism induces agents to enter up to a certain queue length and never removes any agents from the queue; serves them according to a first-come-first-served (FCFS) rule; and provides them with no information throughout the process beyond the recommendations they receive. FCFS is also necessary for optimality in a rich domain. We identify a novel role for queueing disciplines in regulating agents' beliefs and their dynamic incentives and uncover a hitherto unrecognized virtue of FCFS in this regard.

econ.TH↗