How Food Banks Use Markets to Feed the Poor

Abstract

A difficult issue for organizations is how to assign valuable resources across competing opportunities. This work describes how Feeding America allocates about 300 million pounds of food a year to over two hundred food banks across the United States. It does so in an unusual way: in 2005, it switched from a centralized queuing system, where food banks would wait their turn, to a market based mechanism where they bid daily on truckloads of food using a “fake” currency called shares. The change and its impact are described here, showing how the market system allowed food banks to sort based on their preferences.