We study the effectiveness of information design in reducing congestion in social services catering to users with varied levels of need. In the absence of price discrimination and centralized admission, the provider relies on sharing information about wait times to improve welfare. We consider a stylized model with heterogeneous users who differ in their private outside options: low-need users have an acceptable outside option to the social service, whereas high-need users have no viable outside option. Upon arrival, a user decides to wait for the service by joining an unobservable first-come-first-serve queue, or leave and seek her outside option. To reduce congestion and improve social outcomes, the service provider seeks to persuade more low-need users to avail their outside option, and thus better serve high-need users. We characterize the Pareto-optimal signaling mechanisms and compare their welfare outcomes against several benchmarks. We show that if either type is the overwhelming majority of the population, information design does not provide improvement over sharing full information or no information. On the other hand, when the population is a mixture of the two types, information design not only Pareto dominates full-information and no-information mechanisms, in some regimes it also achieves the same welfare as the "first-best", i.e., the Pareto-optimal centralized admission policy with knowledge of users' types.
翻译:我们研究信息设计在减少满足不同需要水平的用户的社会服务拥挤方面的效果;在没有价格歧视和集中接纳的情况下,提供者依靠分享关于等待时间的信息来改善福利;我们考虑与不同用户的外在选择有不同:低需要用户可以接受社会服务的外部选择,而高需要用户则没有可行的外部选择;一抵达时,用户决定等待服务,加入不易观察的先到先得的排队,或离开并寻求外部选择;在没有价格歧视和集中接纳的情况下,服务提供者依靠分享关于等待时间的信息来改善福利;我们考虑与不同用户的外在选择有不同:低需要用户可以接受社会服务的外部选择,而高需要用户则没有可行的外部选择;我们表明,如果两种类型的人都占绝大多数,信息设计并不能改善充分信息或没有信息。另一方面,如果人口是两种类型中的混合,信息设计不仅主导了完整信息和无端信息用户的外部选择,从而更好地为高需要用户服务;我们把Pareto的信号机制与若干基准进行比较;我们表明,如果其中一种类型的信息设计在共享全部信息或无端知识的系统中,它也实现了最佳的福利。