Many administrative appointments are now allocated online via booking platforms. The allocation system often operates on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, meaning that applicants log on to the platform and book the slots still available at the time they log on. In several government departments and countries, it has recently become apparent that this system is vulnerable to slot scalping. Scalpers use bots to book slots faster than applicants. Their speed not only allows them to snap up all available slots as soon as they go online, but also to link them later to their clients’ identities, thereby circumventing the constraints imposed by identity checks. Through their practices, traffickers undermine the principle of equal access to public services that is supposed to prevail. Building on the work of Hakimov et al. (2021), in this paper we present an alternative appointment allocation system that discourages scalpers. This simple system operates ‘in batches’: a batch of appointments is made available online. Applications for this batch are collected over a given period. At the end of this period, the slots are allocated at random to the applications received. If a booked appointment is cancelled, it is not put back online immediately but is allocated as part of one of the subsequent batches. Under this system, ticket touts have the same chance as applicants of securing a slot, and applicants therefore no longer turn to ticket touts. We briefly discuss the potential benefits of such a system for the allocation of appointments at the prefecture for foreign nationals.
Online appointment booking: a mechanism to deter fraud
This paper aims, in particular, to demonstrate that the way in which online appointments are allocated plays an important role in ensuring equal access to public services, and therefore proposes an alternative system for allocating appointment slots that discourages fraudsters.
Reference IPP Policy Brief No. 69
Presentation
Key Results
- The ‘first come, first served’ allocation system for online appointments is vulnerable to traffic.
- We present an alternative allocation system that operates ‘in batches’. This system discourages traffic through two key features.
- Firstly, requests for available slots are collected over a given period. There is therefore no longer any advantage to being quick.
- Secondly, appointments that have been secured but subsequently cancelled cannot be rebooked immediately. Consequently, there is no advantage for fraudsters in flooding the platform with requests using identities that do not belong to their clients.
- In some prefectures, it has become very difficult for foreign nationals to secure appointments to obtain or renew residence permits. Slot trafficking is an additional obstacle that the ‘batch’ system can help to address.
Jeanne Hagenbach
Dorothea Kübler