A vaccine auction

The paper describes an auction for selling vaccines in a pandemic. The environment borrows from the problem of allocating positions for sponsored links on web pages with search results but recognizes the externalities that one man’s vaccination imposes on another. The auction is the pivot Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism and, so, inherits its properties: efficiency and strategy-proofness. Crucially, the auction is designed to let each bidder bid not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of others. The auction requires neither the bidders nor the auctioneer to forecast the efficacy of the vaccine or the evolution of the pandemic.