Object Allocation via Immediate-Acceptance: Characterizations and an Affirmative Action Application

Battal Dogan and Bettina Klaus ()

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

Abstract: Which mechanism to use to allocate school seats to students still remains a question of hot debate. Meanwhile, immediate acceptance mechanisms remain popular in many school districts. We formalize desirable properties of mechanisms when respecting the relative rank of a school among the students' preferences is crucial. We show that those properties, together with well-known desirable resource allocation properties, characterize immediate acceptance mechanisms. Moreover, we show that replacing one of the properties, consistency, with a weaker property, non-bossiness, leads to a characterization of a much larger class of mechanisms, which we call choice-based immediate acceptance mechanisms. It turns out that certain objectives that are not achievable with immediate acceptance mechanisms, such as affirmative action, can be achieved with a choice-based immediate acceptance mechanism.

Keywords: affirmative action; consistency; favoring-higher-ranks; immediate acceptance mechanism; non-bossiness; non-wastefulness; rank-respecting unavailable-type-invariance; resource-monotonicity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C78 D61 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pp.
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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Journal Article: Object allocation via immediate-acceptance: Characterizations and an affirmative action application (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:16.15

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