Endogenous Architecture for Two-Sided Matching Markets
We propose an endogenous architecture where a market designer can impose arbitrary restrictions on the price space, the capacity structure, the entitlement structure, and the rationing system (the architectural components). This not only generates a specific matching model, but it also endogenously generates an equilibrium concept, a domain of preference profiles, and a matching mechanism (the architectural structure). For almost any imposed restrictions, the endogenously generated mechanism is non-manipulable on the endogenously generated domain of preference profiles. The proposed endogenous architecture resolves the market design puzzle by demonstrating that seemingly disparate matching models, including many of the classic applications, are part of the same unifying architecture.
Co-authors: Lars Ehlers, Lars-Gunnar Svensson and Ryan Tierney
Download here [version from August 14, 2026]
Status: Submitted
Dynamic Refugee Matching
Asylum seekers are often assigned to a locality in their host country directly upon arrival based on some type of uninformed dynamic matching system which does not take the background of the asylum seekers into consideration. This paper proposes an informed, intuitive, easy-to-implement and computationally efficient dynamic mechanism for matching asylum seekers to localities. This mechanism can be adopted in any dynamic refugee matching problem given locality-specific quotas and that asylum seekers can be classified into specific types. We demonstrate that any matching selected by the proposed mechanism is Pareto efficient and that envy between localities is bounded by a single asylum seeker. Via simulation, we evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism in settings that resemble the US and the Swedish situations, and show that our mechanism outperforms uninformed mechanisms even in presence of severe misclassification error in the estimation of asylum seeker types.
Coauthors: Lars Ehlers and Alessandro Martinello
Download by klicking here (version from October 29, 2018).
Status: Reject & resubmit (first round)
Work in progress:
A handful of other projects on various topics including, e.g., rationing in times of war, kidney exchange, school choice, organ donation, and networks (no working papers available yet, but stay tuned for more information)