How should authorities that care about match quality and diversity allocate resources in the face of uncertainty? We introduce adaptive priority mechanisms (APM) that prioritize agents based on their scores and characteristics. We show that APM uniquely implement the ex post optimal allocation....

The belief that equality of demand and supply determines price and clears the market is universal. Shockingly, this belief is unfounded. It contradicts macro’s claim that equality of demand and supply determines output. It contradicts (new) monetary theory, which claims that equality of demand...

Mechanisms that rely on course bidding are widely used at Business Schools in order to allocate seats at oversubscribed courses. Bids play two key roles under these mechanisms to infer student preferences and to determine who have bigger claims on course seats. We show that these two roles may...

We analyze mechanisms that are used to allocate dormitory rooms to students at college campuses. Students consist of newcoming freshmen, who do not currently occupy any rooms, and more senior students each of whom occupies a room from the previous year. In addition to the rooms already occupied...

The goal of this paper is to develop an estimable model of President-Congress bargaining in the US, and to use this model to provide a better understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the outcome of a...

Strategy‐proofness (SP) is a sought‐after property in social choice functions because it ensures that agents have no incentive to misrepresent their private information at both the interim and ex post stages. Group strategy‐proofness (GSP), however, is a notion that is applied to the ex...

For object reallocation problems, if preferences are strict but otherwise unrestricted, the Top Trading Cycle rule (TTC) is the leading rule: It is the only rule satisfying efficiency, the endowment lower bound, and strategy-proofness; moreover, TTC coincides with the core. However, on the...

We study priority-based matching markets with public and private endowments. We show that efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance (EADA) is justified-envy minimal in the class of efficient mechanisms, while Top trading cycles (TTC) and other popular mechanisms are not. Our findings highlight...

This paper develops a tractable methodology for designing an optimal priority system for assigning agents to heterogeneous items while accounting for agents' choice behavior. The space of mechanisms being optimized includes deferred acceptance and top trading cycles as special cases. In contrast...

We reinterpret the `bossiness' of a private-goods allocation rule (Satterthwaite and Sonneschein, 1981) as the ability of an agent to `influence' another's welfare with no change to her own welfare. We propose simple conditions on (1) which agents may have influence (`acyclicity' and...