Tools to allocate medical supplies in a crisis: Cramton, Ockenfels, Roth and Wilson in Nature

Publishing a commentary in Nature is a dizzying process for anyone accustomed to the stately dance of publishing in Economics.  It's fast (in this case the commentary below appeared one month after submission), and the editors play an active role.

Borrow crisis tactics to get COVID-19 supplies to where they are needed
Emergency procedures that keep electricity running and food banks stocked can also keep health workers in protective equipment.
Peter Cramton, Axel Ockenfels, Alvin E. Roth and Robert B. Wilson
Nature 582, 334-336, 11 JUNE 2020 doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-01750-6

We began thinking about what market designers know about addressing shortages in an emergency.  We considered the experience in electricity markets and food banks as potentially relevant.
Here are some of our early notes:

• Selling to the highest bidder isn’t always acceptable in an emergency (repugnance)
• But prices matter, because they help generate new supply and reduce excessive  precautionary demand
• And prices can do some of their work even if just in specialized accounting money, so that we’re not just sending supplies to the wealthiest institutions
• Coordination is needed; centralized clearinghouses can help.
• It would have been useful to have had a sufficiently centralized clearinghouse operating as an ordinary market exchange in normal times, that could go into emergency mode when required (so that new suppliers and demanders would have had an address to go to to take part in newly formed supply chains...)
• Our experience in this regard now (after wave 1 of COVID-19) should inform how we think about these markets in the near future (wave 2, next winter, etc.) and the further future (future pandemic diseases...)
• In some respects Germany may be better poised to take steps towards a centralized clearinghouse than we are in the decentralized U.S., especially given our current political disarray. (But Germany has politics of its own...)
• It will be worthwhile to think more about the design of markets that are robust against emergencies –  so they can transition gracefully from normal to emergency states, and back.