This book is an exploration of the ubiquity of ambiguity in decision-making under uncertainty. It presents various essays on behavioral economics and behavioral finance that draw on the theory of Black Swans (Taleb 2010), which argues for a distinction between unprecedented events in our past...

School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students’ educational outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used...

Affirmative action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for. Its implementation affects the underlying incentive structure which might induce lower performance by participants, and...

We show that one of the main results in Chen and Sönmez (2006, 2008) [6] and [7] does no longer hold when the number of recombinations is sufficiently increased to obtain reliable conclusions. No school choice mechanism is significantly superior in terms of efficiency.

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects' incentives are drastically...