This paper studies the problem of assigning a set of indivisible objects to a set of agents when monetary transfers are not allowed and agents reveal only ordinal preferences, but random assignments are possible. We offer two characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism, which assigns...

We show that the class of preferences satisfying the Gross Substitutes condition of Kelso and Crawford (1982) is strictly larger than the class of Endowed Assignment Valuations of Hatfield and Milgrom (2005), thus resolving the open question posed by the latter paper. In particular, our result...

This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are...

The allocation and exchange of discrete resources, such as transplant organs, pub- lic housing, dormitory rooms, and many other resources for which agents have single-unit demand, is often conducted via direct mechanisms without monetary transfers. Incentive compatibility and ef?ciency are...

We prove that in a market where agents rank objects independently and uniformly at random, there exists an assignment of objects to agents with a constant average rank (i.e., an average rank independent of the market size). The proof builds on techniques from random graph theory and the FKG...