Scarcity and Property Rights

  You arrive to class, and the building administrators have put the 35 student class into a classroom with only 20 seats available, a mistake that is likely to be permanent due to the heavy space constraints at Leeds. The professor has the flu and is not up to the task of determining who gets to sit where, and so he randomly chooses you to determine how the seats will be allocated. Choose the allocation rule (or rules) that you think would best allocate seats to students who value them the most. Defend your answer in comparison to other possible rules (i.e. "allocating based upon last name would cost less than figuring out who valued what, and we all value seats to some extent, so that's why I chose this rule"), as well as more general considerations of efficiency and fairness.