We investigate the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions (ZVS) in medicine and related subjects. This mechanism consists of three procedures based on final grades from school ("Abiturbestenverfahren", "Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen") and on...

This paper analyses the efficiency of the equilibrium allocation in a matching model with two types of workers and jobs. The basic assumption is that high-skill workers can perform both skilled and unskilled jobs, while low-skill workers can only perform unskilled jobs. Our first result shows...

The proposed game is a natural extension of the Shapley and Shubik Assignment Game to the case where each seller owns a set of different objets instead of only one indivisible object. We propose definitions of pairwise stability and group stability that are adapted to our framework. Existence of...

In this paper we answer a question posed by Sertel and Sanver (2002) on the manipulability of optimal matching rules in matching problems with endowments. We characterize the classes of consumption rules under which optimal matching rules can be manipulated via predonation of endowment.

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects' incentives are drastically...

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the...

This paper studies the aggregate economic effects of diversity policies such as affirmative action in college admission. If agents are constrained in the side payments they can make, the free market allocation displays excessive segregation relative to the first-best. Affirmative action policies...

We study the problem of allocating workers to different projects in which each project requires having a minimum number of workers assigned to it or else it does not open. We show that the well-known serial dictatorship mechanism is neither strategy-proof nor Pareto efficient. Thus, we propose...

In a school choice problem each school has a priority ordering over students. These priority orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling already at the school. We argue that by including just the priority orderings in the problem, and not...

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...