We study a Baron-Ferejohn (1989) type of bargaining model to which we append an investment stage. As long as no agreement is reached, a new proposer is selected randomly from the player set. A proposal is accepted if at least q players accept it. Prior to the bargaining stage, players may make...

Interactions between players with private information and opposed interests are often prone to bad advice and inefficient outcomes, e.g. markets for financial or health care services. In a deception game we investigate experimentally which factors could improve advice quality. Besides advisor...

In school choice problems, the widely used manipulable Immediate Acceptance mechanism (IA) disadvantages unsophisticated applicants, but may ex-ante Pareto dominate any strategy-proof alternative. In these cases, it may be preferable to aid applicants within IA, rather than to abandon it. In a...

We design and implement an iterative, program-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism with ties (IDAT) and apply it to childcare assignment in two German cities. The mechanism can accommodate complementarities in providers' preferences, is fast to terminate even in larger cities, is difficult to...

The use of lotteries is advocated to desegregate schools. We study lottery quotas embedded in the two most common school choice mechanisms, namely deferred and immediate acceptance mechanisms. Some seats are allocated based on merit (e.g., grades) and some based on lottery draws. We focus on the...

Extensive evidence suggests that participants in the direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. In particular, students with low priority tend to misrepresent their preferences for popular schools. To explain the observed data, we introduce...

Agents in a finite two-sided market make costly investments and are then matched assortatively based on these investments. Besides signaling complementary types, investments also generate benefits for partners. We shed light on quantitative properties of the equilibrium investment behavior. The...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used "Berlin" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not...

Matching markets can be unstable when individuals prefer to be matched to a partner who also wants to be matched with them. Through a pre-registered and theory-guided laboratory experiment, we provide evidence that such reciprocal preferences exist, significantly decrease stability in matching...

Students participating in centralized admissions procedures do not typically have access to the information used to determine their matched school, such as other students' preferences or school priorities. This can lead to doubts about whether their matched schools were computed correctly (the...