House Allocation with Overlapping Agents: A DynamicMechanism Design Approach

Many real-life applications of house allocation problems are dynamic. For example, inthe case of on-campus housing for college students, each year freshmen apply to move inand graduating seniors leave. Each student stays on campus for a few years only. A studentis a \newcomer" in the beginning and then becomes an \existing tenant." Motivated by thisobservation, we introduce a model of house allocation with overlapping agents. In termsof dynamic mechanism design, we examine two representative static mechanisms of serialdictatorship (SD) and top trading cycles (TTC), both of which are based on an orderingof agents and give an agent with higher order an opportunity to obtain a better house.We show that for SD mechanisms, the ordering that favors existing tenants is better thanthe one that favors newcomers in terms of Pareto efficiency.[...]