Bidding without pricing: An iterative bidding mechanism for scheduling non-commercial services

Abstract

This paper presents an iterative bidding mechanism for scheduling non-commercial services provided by publicly funded scientific facilities, healthcare systems, government agencies, and many other not-for-profit organizations. In non-commercial service scheduling problems, service providers strive to maximize the common welfare of the community through effective scheduling of their services and, at the same time, customers may behave strategically to achieve their individual objectives by not revealing their complete availabilities. This misalignment of objectives between the service provider and the customers leads naturally to the design of market-based scheduling mechanisms. A unique challenge in this non-commercial setting is that monetary payments cannot be involved in the design of the mechanism. We propose a non-price iterative bidding framework which aligns customers' self-interests with the service provider's objective. In addition, the mechanism also accommodates customers' personal preferences. We show that, under the proposed mechanism, myopic bidding is the dominant strategy for customers.