Abstract:
Priority-based allocation often requires eliminating justified envy, making serial dictatorship (SD) the only non-wasteful direct mechanism with that property. However, SD's outcomes can conflict with the policymaker's objectives. We introduce visible fairness, a framework where fairness is evaluated using coarser information. This is achieved by designing message spaces that strategically conceal information that could render desired allocations unfair. We characterize these mechanisms as generalizations of SD, establish conditions for strategy-proofness, and show how to implement distributional constraints. This creates a new trade-off: achieving distributional goals may require limiting preference elicitation, forgoing efficiency gains even when compatible with the constraints.