Designing for Diversity: Matching with Slot-Specific Priorities

Scott Kominers and Tayfun Sönmez

No 806, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: To encourage diversity, branches may vary contracts' priorities across slots. The agents who match to branches, however, have preferences only over match partners and contractual terms. Ad hoc approaches to resolving agents' indifferences across slots in the Chicago and Boston school choice programs have introduced biases, which can be corrected with more careful market design. Slot-specific priorities can fail the substitutability condition typically crucial for outcome stability. Nevertheless, an embedding into a one-to-one agent--slot matching market shows that stable outcomes exist and can be found by a cumulative offer mechanism that is strategy-proof and respects unambiguous improvements in priority.

Keywords: Market Design; Matching with Contracts; Stability; Strategy-Proofness; School Choice; Affirmative Action (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D63 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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