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How market design can feed the poorworksinprogress.co/issue/how-market-design-can-feed-the-poor
166 sats \ 2 comments \ @supratic 8h food_and_drinks
For most of its history, Feeding America, the nation’s largest nonprofit, relied on a broken system to distribute its 220 million pounds of food per year. It ignored existing stocks and donations, flooding fully stocked food banks in Idaho with potatoes and warehouses in Alaska with five gallon buckets of pickles.
To fix how America fed its hungry would require the economics of market design. The new system increased food supply by 100 million pounds annually, equivalent to feeding an additional 60,000 people every day. It is one of the clearest successes of market design so far. 1

Footnotes

  1. The Allocation of Food to Food Banks https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/11.1-Prendergast-food4-model.pdf ↩
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 3h
Inspiring article. Free market principles in action.
the socialist board member who had opposed the system was now one of its strongest advocates.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 3h
Yeah, market design is a pretty cool area of study in game theory. It's all about looking at the nuts and bolts of how things actually get allocated, especially in systems where classical price discovery isn't as applicable.
Market design scholars designed more efficient algorithms for matching kidney donors to patients, for example, and Amazon hires people with that training to help work on their internal logistics.
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