Incompatibility between stability and consistency

Mustafa Afacan and Umut Dur

Economics Letters, 2017, vol. 150, issue C, 135-137

Abstract: Stability is a main concern in the school choice problem. However, it does not come for free. The literature shows that stability is incompatible with Pareto efficiency. Nevertheless, it has been ranked over Pareto efficiency by many school districts, and thereof, they are using stable mechanisms. In this note, we reveal another important cost of stability: “consistency”, which is a robustness property that requires from a mechanism that whenever some students leave the problem along with their assignments, the remaining students’ assignments do not change after running the mechanism in the smaller problem. Consequently, we show that no stable mechanism is consistent.

Keywords: Matching theory; Market design; Consistency; Stability; Incompatibility; School choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:150:y:2017:i:c:p:135-137

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2016.11.022

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