Strategy-Proofness makes the Difference: Deferred-Acceptance with Responsive Priorities

Lars Ehlers and Bettina Klaus ()

Cahiers de recherche from Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques

Abstract: In college admissions and student placements at public schools, the admission decision can be thought of as assigning indivisible objects with capacity constraints to a set of students such that each student receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not allowed. In these important market design problems, the agent-proposing deferred-acceptance (DA-) mechanism with responsive strict priorities performs well and economists have successfully implemented DA-mechanisms or slight variants thereof. We show that almost all real-life mechanisms used in such environments - including the large classes of priority mechanisms and linear programming mechanisms - satisfy a set of simple and intuitive properties. Once we add strategy-proofness to these properties, DA-mechanisms are the only ones surviving. In market design problems that are based on weak priorities (like school choice), generally multiple tie-breaking (MTB) procedures are used and then a mechanism is implemented with the obtained strict priorities. By adding stability with respect to the weak priorities, we establish the first normative foundation for MTB-DA-mechanisms that are used in NYC.

Keywords: Deferred-acceptance mechanism; indivisible objects allocation; multiple tie-breaking; school choice; strategy-proofness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Working Paper: Strategy-Proofness makes the Difference: Deferred-Acceptance with Responsive Priorities (2012)
Working Paper: Strategy-Proofness Makes the Difference: Deferred-Acceptance with Responsive Priorities (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtl:montde:2012-12

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