Assignment mechanisms: common preferences and information acquisition

Georgy Artemov

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as matching applicants to schools. An applicant's utility is a sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The idiosyncratic component is unknown to the applicant but can be learned at a cost. When applicants are assigned using an ordinal strategy-proof mechanism, too few acquire information, generating a significant welfare loss. Affirmative action and other realistic policies may lead to a Pareto improvement. As incentives to acquire information differ across mechanisms, ignoring such incentives may lead to incorrect welfare assessments, for example, in comparing a popular Immediate Assignment and an ordinal strategy-proof mechanism.

Date: 2021-01, Revised 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.06885 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Assignment mechanisms: Common preferences and information acquisition (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2101.06885

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().