We study problems of allocating objects among people. Some objects may be initially owned and the rest are unowned. Each person needs exactly one object and initially owns at most one object. We drop the common assumption of strict preferences. Without this assumption, it suffices to study...

This paper considers a resource allocation mechanism that utilizes a profit-maximizing auctioneer/matchmaker in the Kelso–Crawford (1982) (many-to-one) assignment problem. We consider general and simple (individualized price) message spaces for firmsʼ reports following Milgrom (2010). We show...

We present a survey of the emerging literature on the design of matching markets. We survey the articles on discrete resource allocation problems, their solutions, and their applications in three related domains. The first domain gives the theoretical background regarding the basic models,...

Public school systems generally use one of the three competing mechanisms – the Boston mechanism, the deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycle mechanism – for assigning students to specific schools. Although the literature generally claims that the Boston mechanism is Pareto...

This paper inspires from a real-life assignment problem faced by the Mexican Ministry of Public Education. We introduce a dynamic school choice problem that consists in assigning positions to overlapping generations of teachers. From one period to another, teachers can either retain their...

We introduce the notion of group robust stability which requires robustness against a combined manipulation, first misreporting preferences and then rematching, by any group of students in the school choice type of matching markets. Our first result shows that there is no group robustly stable...

We study resource allocation with multi-unit demand, such as the allocation of courses to students. In contrast to the case of single-unit demand, no stable mechanism, not even the (student-proposing) deferred acceptance algorithm, achieves desirable properties: it is not strategy-proof and the...

The absence of simultaneous cycles is a sufficient condition for the existence of singleton cores. Acyclicity in the preferences of either side of the market is a minimal condition that guarantees the existence of singleton cores.