Various markets ban or heavily restrict monetary transfers. This is often motivated by moral concerns. However, it appears to be disputable whether the observed restrictions on transfers are the appropriate market design answer to these concerns. Instead of exogenously restricting transfers on a...

I examine the role of intermediaries on the world's largest peer-to-peer online lending platform. This marketplace as well as other recently opened lending websites allow people to auction microcredit over the internet and are in line with the disintermediation in financial transactions through...

Agents with reciprocal preferences prefer to be matched to a partner who also likes to collaborate with them. In this paper, we introduce and formalize reciprocal preferences, apply them to matching markets, and analyze the implications for mechanism design. Formally, the preferences of an agent...

Although the literature on assignment mechanisms emphasizes the importance of efficiency based on agents' preferences, policymakers may want to achieve different goals. For instance, school districts may want to affect student learning outcomes but must take teacher welfare into account when...

I provide a brief introduction to the early literatures on Matching, Auctions, and Market Design.The design of matching markets and auctions has brought economic theory and practice together. Indeed, this is an area where microeconomic theory has had its largest direct impact. This is in part...

Two-sided matching platforms can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how matching platforms should be designed, we introduce a dynamic two-sided search model with strategic agents who must bear a cost to discover their value for each potential...

This article explores the impact of procedural information on the behavior of applicants under two of the most commonly used school admissions procedures: the Gale-Shapley mechanism and the Boston mechanism. In a lab experiment, I compare the impact of information about the mechanism,...

We examine two-sided markets where players arrive stochastically over time and are drawn from a continuum of types. The cost of matching a client and provider varies, so a social planner is faced with two contending objectives: a) to reduce players' waiting time before getting matched; and b) to...

Many markets ban monetary transfers. Rather than exogenously imposing this constraint, we introduce discrimination-freeness as a desideratum based on egalitarian objectives. Discrimination-freeness requires that an agent's object assignment is independent of his wealth. We show that money cannot...

Every year during school and college admissions, students and their parents devote considerable time and effort to acquiring costly information about their own preferences. In a market where students are ranked by universities based on exam scores, we explore ways to reduce wasteful information...