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 Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers representing children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE's operational challenges using case worker surveys and a regression analysis of data on child outcomes over multiple years. Using...

This paper studies a general school choice problem with or without outside options. The Gale-Shapley student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism (DA) has played a central role not only in theory but also in important practical applications. We show that in problems where some students cannot...

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...

A new mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others. We introduce a new framework for school-choice problems and two notions of fairness in lottery design based on ex-ante...

There has been a surge of interest in stochastic assignment mechanisms which proved to be theoretically compelling thanks to their prominent welfare properties. Contrary to stochastic mechanisms, however, lottery mechanisms are commonly used for indivisible good allocation in real-life. To help...

Many school districts in the US. employ centralized clearing houses to assign students to public schools. An important potential threat against any school choice mechanism is the tendency of schools to circumvent the procedure via two kinds of strategic manipulation: manipulation via capacities...