It is well known that when demands are uncertain, it may be possible to reduce capital investments and improve customer service by sharing stocks or capacities among several systems so that shortages in one system could be offset by surpluses in another. And while traditionally the implementation of pooling requires that the pooled stocks or capacities be physically consolidated and centralized, the use of information technology sometimes offers a new ways of extracting the same benefits even in a physically decentralized structure. We refer to this later phenomenon as virtual pooling.

We develop a simple and general framework for the analysis of such systems from the perspective of incentives. We examine several concepts from the fields of economics, game theory and mechanism design that are useful in this context. A key element of the analysis is the concept of demand and stock claims.