Controlled choice over public schools attempts giving options to parents while maintaining diversity, often enforced by setting feasibility constraints with hard upper and lower bounds for each student type. We demonstrate that there might not exist assignments that satisfy standard fairness and...

We study dominant strategy implementable direct mechanisms that minimize the expected surplus from core deviations. Using incentive compatibility conditions, we formulate the core deviation miminimization problem as a calculus of variations problem and then numerically solve it for some...

Controlled choice over public schools attempts giving options to parents while maintaining diversity, often enforced by setting feasibility constraints with hard upper and lower bounds for each student type. We demonstrate that there might not exist assignments that satisfy standard fairness and...

We offer a theoretical and empirical comparison of auctions and negotiated sales. We first build a simple model to show that auctions generate a higher relative price than negotiated sales when demand for the asset is strong, when the asset is more homogeneous, and when the asset attracts buyers...

Several recent papers have proposed recursive Lagrangian-based methods for solving dynamic contracting problems. These methods give rise to Bellman operators that incorporate either a dual inf-sup or a saddle point operation. We give conditions that ensure the Bellman operator implied by a dual...

As school districts integrate charter schools for centralized admissions in Denver, New Orleans, Newark and Washington D.C., some charter schools have stayed out of the system. This is counterintuitive as centralized clearinghouses are deemed beneficial to schools as well as students. We provide...

Many organizations rely on the skills of innovative individuals to create value, including academic and government institutions, think tanks, and knowledge-based firms. Roughly speaking, workers in these fields can be divided into two categories: specialists, who have a deep knowledge of a...

Collaboration networks provide a method for examining the highly heterogeneous structure of collaborative communities. However, existing models of network formation do not provide a connection between observed network heterogeneity and characteristics of the individuals or communities. The model...

A search and matching model, when calibrated to the mean and volatility of unemployment in the postwar sample, can potentially explain the large unemployment dynamics in the Great Depression. The congestion externality induced by matching frictions causes the unemployment rate to increase...