Object Allocation via Deferred-Acceptance: Strategy-Proofness and Comparative Statics

Lars Ehlers and Bettina Klaus ()

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: We study the problem of assigning indivisible and heterogenous objects (e.g., houses, jobs, offices, school or university admissions etc.) to agents. Each agent receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not possible. We consider mechanisms satisfying a set of basic properties (unavailable-type-invariance, individual-rationality, weak non-wastefulness, or truncation-invariance). In the house allocation problem, where at most one copy of each object is available, deferred acceptance (DA)-mechanisms allocate objects based on exogenously fixed objects' priorities over agents and the agent-proposing deferred-acceptance-algorithm. For house allocation we show that DA-mechanisms are characterized by our basic properties and (i) strategy-proofness and population-monotonicity or (ii) strategy-proofness and resource-monotonicity. Once we allow for multiple identical copies of objects, on the one hand the first characterization breaks down and there are unstable mechanisms satisfying our basic properties and (i) strategy-proofness and population-monotonicity. On the other hand, our basic properties and (ii) strategy-proofness and resource-monotonicitycharacterize (the most general) class of DA-mechanisms based on objects' fixed choice functions that are acceptant, monotonic, substitutable, and consistent. These choice functions are used by objects to reject agents in the agent-proposing deferred-acceptance-algorithm. Therefore, in the general model resource-monotonicity is the "stronger" comparative statics requirement because it characterizes (together with our basic requirements and strategy-proofness) choice-based DA-mechanisms whereas population-monotonicity (together with our basic properties and strategy-proofness) does not.

Keywords: indivisible objects allocation; deferred-acceptance-algorithm; strategy-proofness; resource-monotonicity; population-monotonicity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pp.
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Object allocation via deferred-acceptance: Strategy-proofness and comparative statics (2016)
Working Paper: Object allocation via deferred-acceptance: strategy-proofness and comparative statics (2014)
Working Paper: Object Allocation via Deferred-Acceptance: Strategy-Proofness and Comparative Statics (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:14.08

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