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...

When applying to a university, students and their parents devote considerable time acquiring information about university programs in order to form preferences. We explore ways to reduce wasteful information acquisition, that is, to help students avoid acquiring information about out-of-reach...

We study road congestion as a mechanism design problem. In our basic model we analyze the allocation of a set of drivers among two roads, one of which may be congested. An additional driver on the congestible road imposes an externality on the other drivers by increasing their travel time. Each...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used "Berlin" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not...

We show that Ergin & Sönmez's (2006) results which show that for schools it is a dominant strategy to truthfully rank the students under the Boston mechanism, and that the Nash equilibrium outcomes in undominated strategies of the induced game are stable, rely crucially on two assumptions....

The use of lotteries is advocated to desegregate schools. We study lottery quotas embedded in the two most common school choice mechanisms, namely deferred and immediate acceptance mechanisms. Some seats are allocated based on merit (e.g., grades) and some based on lottery draws. We focus on the...