What happens when America's Soviet-style food banks embrace free-market economics?

Spoiler: They thrive

Food bank
(Image credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

If you were in charge of a massive, centrally planned hunger-relief charity, would you ask a free-market economist for advice? Probably not. And yet, this is exactly what Feeding America, the largest network of food banks in the United States, did in 2005.

In fact, they asked not one but four professors at the University of Chicago Booth Business School to help them figure out the best way to allocate the more than 60,000 tons of donated food that Feeding America receives each year.

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Alex Teytelboym
Alex Teytelboym is an economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford. His academic work is about networks, matching markets, auctions, and the environment. He writes about recent research in microeconomics.