From Herding to Batching: Two Models of Common-Value Allocation

More than a quarter of recovered kidneys in the U.S. are discarded, and herding in the priority queue is a leading suspect. This talk develops two theoretical models of batch offering as an alternative. The first treats the planner as a mechanism designer who chooses batch sizes to balance information aggregation against agents' strategic incentives; greedy adaptive batching strictly outperforms sequential offering whenever signals are informative relative to the prior. The second treats agents inside a batch as players in a common-value stopping game, deriving a \textit{barrier-strategy} equilibrium and tracing how batch size, signal accuracy, and ischemic discounting jointly shape waste and error rates.