In most variants of the Hotelling-Downs model of election, it is assumed that voters have concave utility functions. This assumption is arguably justied in issues such as economic policies, but convex utilities are perhaps more appropriate in others such as moral or religious issues. In this...

We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better whenever that school improves and thereby becomes...

We consider the many-to-many two-sided matching problem under a stringent domain restriction on preferences called the max-min criterion. We show that, even under this restriction, there is no stable mechanism that is weakly Pareto efficient, strategy-proof, or monotonic (i.e. respects...

We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better whenever that school improves and thereby becomes...

In an attempt to increase the placement of medical residents to rural hospitals, the Japanese government recently introduced "regional caps" which restrict the total number of residents matched within each region of the country. The government modified the deferred acceptance mechanism...

Accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists, because couples view pairs of jobs as complements. A stable matching may not exist when couples are present. We find conditions under which a stable...

In July 2005 the Boston School Committee voted to replace the existing Boston school choice mechanism with a deferred acceptance mechanism that simplifies the strategic choices facing parents. This paper presents the empirical case against the previous Boston mechanism, a priority matching...

New mobile development platforms are a 21st-century growth pole. By successfully recombining existing information technologies with new innovations, they have spurred a positive feedback loop of consumer adoption of mobile devices and firm entry into a wide variety of applications, or...

We estimate how physicians’ financial incentives affect their treatment choices in heart attack management, using a large dataset of private health insurance claims. Different insurance plans pay physicians different amounts for the same services, generating the required variation in...

Participants in defined contribution (DC) retirement plans rarely adjust their portfolio allocations, suggesting that their investment choices and consequent money flows are sticky and not discerning. Yet, the participants’ inertia could be offset by the DC plan sponsors, who adjust the...