This paper estimates the deadweight loss associated with not failing an optimal number of students. We find that this loss ranges between $3,200 and $4,600 per student over the student's four-year undergraduate career. One possible ramification of adopting a more stringent student-failure policy...

Abstract This paper characterizes the top trading cycles mechanism for the school choice problem. Schools may have multiple available seats to be assigned to students. For each school a strict priority ordering of students is determined by the school district. Each student has strict preference...

Between the years 2001 and 2015, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia implemented a policy providing mandatory and free college admission exams (ACT or SAT) to all public high school juniors. As such, the policy reduced to zero out of pocket expenses for exam fees, and likely reduced...

A particular adaptation of Gale's top trading cycles procedure to school choice, the so-called TTC mechanism, has attracted much attention both in theory and practice due to its superior efficiency and incentive features. We discuss and introduce alternative adaptations of Gale's original...

The prevalent affirmative action policy in school choice limits the number of admitted majority students to give minority students higher chances to attend their desired schools. There have been numerous efforts to reconcile affirmative action policies with celebrated matching mechanisms such as...

A set of indivisible objects is allocated among agents with strict preferences. Each object has a weak priority ranking of the agents. A collection of priority rankings, a priority structure, is solvable if there is a strategy-proof mechanism that is constrained efficient, i.e. that always...

Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each Army branch in military cadet matching and diversity considerations in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic...

We generalize the school choice problem by defining a notion of allowable priority violations. In this setting, a weak axiom of stability (partial stability) allows only certain priority violations. We introduce a class of algorithms called the Student Exchange under Partial Fairness (SEPF)....

In talent-intensive jobs, workers' quality is revealed by their performance. This enhances productivity and earnings, but also increases layoff risk. Firms cannot insure workers against this risk if they compete fiercely for talent. In this case, the more risk-averse workers will choose less...