Strategy-proof assignment of bundles with ordinal preferences: An application in retail logistics

Long waiting times at loading docks of retailers are a substantial problem in retail logistics. Congestion results from a lack of coordination among carriers. One possibility for reducing the waiting time of carriers at warehouses is to coordinate the carriers and retailers by a central timeslot management. Since carriers have to visit several warehouses in a special order, they have preferences over subsets of timeslots describing the retailers on a route, which we call bundles. Carriers need to get all relevant timeslots on a route. We are interested in coordination mechanisms that do not require monetary transfers. Matching with complementarities is an extension of the Capacitated House Allocation problem, where agents have preferences over bundles of objects. We present a generalisation of the Random Serial Dictatorship that is strategy-proof, symmetric, and computes Pareto optimal matchings.