The rule of k names can be described as follows: given a set of candidates for office, a committee chooses k members from this set by voting, and makes a list with their names. Then a single individual from outside the committee selects one of the listed names for the office. Different variants...

The rule of k names can be described as follows: given a set of candidates for office, a committee chooses k members from this set by voting, and makes a list with their names. Then a single individual from outside the committee selects one of the listed names for the office. Different variants...

We consider the following allocation problem: A fixed number of public facilities must be located on a line. Society is composed of N agents, who must be allocated to one and only one of these facilities. Agents have single peaked preferences over the possible location of the facilities they are...

In this note we show that no solution to coalition formation games can satisfy a set of axioms that we propose as reasonable. Our result points out that “solutions” to the coalition formation cannot be interpreted as predictions of what would be “resting points” for a game in the way...

We consider the following allocation problem: A fixed number of public facilities must be located on a line. Society is composed of N agents, who must be allocated to one and only one of these facilities. Agents have single peaked preferences over the possible location of the facilities they are...

We experimentally investigate in the laboratory two prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools. We study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the GaleShapley...

Using the assignment of students to schools as our leading example, we study many-to-one two-sided matching markets without transfers. Students are endowed with cardinal preferences and schools with ordinal ones, while preferences of both sides need not be strict. Using the idea of a competitive...

We show that the full version of the so-called "rural hospital theorem" generalizes to many-to-many matching problems where agents on both sides of the problem have substitutable and weakly separable preferences. We reinforce our result by showing that when agents' preferences satisfy...

Couples looking for jobs in the same labor market may cause instabilities. We determine a natural preference domain, the domain of weakly responsive preferences, that guarantees stability. Under a restricted unemployment aversion condition we show that this domain is maximal for the existence of...

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the...