To increase the efficiency of production in a planned economy, it is necessary to develop mechanisms of functioning that encourage enterprises to maximize the accounting of all reserves for increasing production efficiency. In this article, a model of a competitive mechanism for the functioning of active systems is developed. A feature of competitive mechanisms is that planning or incentive procedures include a competition procedure between active elements claiming to receive a profitable plan or any preferential terms of resource provision, financing and incentives. The authors conducted a study of the competitive mechanism on the example of the problem of resource allocation; It is proved that there is a Nash equilibrium for the competitive mechanism. The paper formulated and proved a theorem on the optimality of competitive mechanisms, which shows how effective the competitive mechanism for the distribution of limited resources.