Endogenous Architecture for Two-Sided Matching Markets
The standard approach in the market design literature is to tailor specific models that resemble real-life markets. We contrast this approach by proposing an endogenous architecture that contains a model architecture (consisting of an equilibrium concept, a domain of preference profiles, and a matching mechanism) that is endogenously determined by the restrictions that the market designer imposes on the architectural components (the price space, the capacity structure, the entitlement structure, and the rationing system). The endogenous architecture offers flexibility when designing diverse matching markets, while ensuring non-manipulability. We also resolve a puzzle in the market design literature by demonstrating that seemingly disparate matching models, including many of the classic models, can be generated as special cases of the proposed endogenous architecture.
Co-authors: Lars Ehlers, Lars-Gunnar Svensson and Ryan Tierney
Download: a first version will hopefully be available soon
Status: Work in progress
Beyond Truth-telling: A Replication Study on School Choice
In a recent paper, Fack et al. (2019, American Economic Review) convincingly argue and theoretically demonstrate that there may be strong incentives for students to play non-truthtelling strategies when reporting preferences over schools, even when the celebrated deferred acceptance algorithm is employed. Their statistical test also rejects the (weak) truth-telling assumption in favour of another assumption, called stability, using a single data set on school choice in Paris. This paper uses Swedish school choice data and replicates their empirical finding in 66 of the 75 investigated data sets (P-value threshold 0.05).
Co-authors: Dany Kessel, Nils Lager, Elisabet Olme and Simon Reese
Download the working paper here (version from October, 2024)
Status: Revise & Resubmit (first round)
Non-Manipulable House Exchange under (Minimum) Equilibrium Prices
We consider a market with indivisible objects, called houses, and money. On this market, each house is initially owned (or rented) by some agent and each agent demands precisely one house. The problem is to identify the complete set of direct allocation mechanisms that can be used to reallocate the houses among the agents. The focus is on price mechanisms, i.e., mappings of preference profiles to price equilibria, that are strategy-proof and satisfy an individual rationality condition. We prove that the only mechanism that satisfies these conditions is a price mechanism with a minimal equilibrium price vector. The result is not true in full preference domain. Instead, we identify a smaller domain, that contains almost all profiles, where the result holds.
Coauthors: Lars-Gunnar Svensson and Lars Ehlers
Download by klicking here (version from November, 2024).
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., kidney exchange, school choice, organ donation, rationing, and networks (no working papers available yet, but stay tuned for more information)