In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...

Although many centralized school assignment systems use strategically simple mechanisms, applicants often make dominated choices. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that many college applicants forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver. Using two empirical strategies,...

Many economic-theoretic models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. Such assumptions introduce a conceptual problem, as results that rely on finiteness are often implicitly nonrobust; for example, they may depend upon edge...

We present direct field evidence of preference misrepresentation under deferred acceptance. A large fraction of highly educated participants, who had been informed about the strategy-proof nature of the mechanism in numerous ways, failed to play truthfully: they ranked a non-funded position...

In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...