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...

Distributional constraints are common features in many real matching markets, such as medical residency matching, school admissions, and teacher assignment. We develop a general theory of matching mechanisms under distributional constraints. We identify the necessary and sufficient condition on...

Distributional constraints are common features in many real matching markets, such as medical residency matching, school admissions, and teacher assignment. We develop a general theory of matching mechanisms under distributional constraints. We identify the necessary and sufficient condition on...

We investigate efficient and minimally unstable Pareto improvements over the deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism-a popular school choice mechanism that is stable but not efficient. We show that there is no Pareto improvement over the DA mechanism that is minimally unstable among efficient...

It is known that there are school choice problems without an efficient and stable assignment. We consider comparing assignments in terms of their stability by comparing their sets of blocking (student-school) pairs or comparing their sets of blocking students who are involved in at least one...

We investigate efficient and minimally unstable Pareto improvements over the deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism-a popular school choice mechanism that is stable but not efficient. We show that there is no Pareto improvement over the DA mechanism that is minimally unstable among efficient...

Consider a market for a resource under disequilibrium prices where suppliers and demanders are privately informed about their optimal supply and consumption levels. Strategy-proof market clearing mechanisms give suppliers and demanders dominant strategy incentives to truthfully reveal this...

This paper develops a tractable theoretical framework for the Top Trading Cycles (TTC) mechanism for school choice that allows quantifying welfare and optimizing policy decisions. We compute welfare for TTC and Deferred Acceptance (DA) under different priority structures, and find that the...

We run laboratory experiments where subjects are matched to colleges, and colleges are not strategic agents. We test the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism versus the Iterative Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (IDAM), a matching mechanism based on a new family of procedures being used...

We introduce a new mechanism for matching students to schools or universities, denoted Iterative Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (IDAM), inspired by procedures currently being used to match millions of students to public universities in Brazil and China. Unlike most options available in the...