Top Trading Cycles vs. the Crawler: The Role of Obvious Strategy-Proofness

Aleksei Chernulich, Nobuyuki Hanaki and Yuki Tamura

ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, The University of Osaka

Abstract: Obvious strategy-proofness makes truth-telling, in theory, an obvious choice. We experimentally study its role in the object-reallocation problem with single-peaked preferences. We compare two efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms, Top Trading Cycles and the Crawler, under static and gradual implementations. In our experiment, all four mechanisms generate the same outcome under truth-telling, but only the Gradual Crawler is obviously strategy-proof. The Gradual Crawler achieves significantly higher empirical efficiency than the other mechanisms. By contrast, the Gradual TTC does not outperform the Static TTC, suggesting that gradual implementation alone is not sufficient and that the Gradual Crawler benefits from its stop-or-continue procedure.

Date: 2026-08
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dpr:wpaper:1318

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