End-stage renal disease (ESRD) is the ninth-leading cause of death in the U.S. Transplantation is the most viable renal replacement therapy for ESRD patients, but there is a severe disparity between the demand for kidneys for transplantation and the supply. This shortage is further complicated...

Although a pilot national live-donor kidney exchange program was recently launched in the US, the kidney shortage is increasing faster than ever. A new solution paradigm is able to incorporate compatible pairs in exchange. In this paper, we consider an exchange framework that has both compatible...

This paper studies the problem of assigning a set of indivisible objects to a set of agents when monetary transfers are not allowed. We offer two characterizations of the prominent lottery assignment mechanism called the probabilistic serial. We show that it is the only mechanism satisfying...

A new centralized mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools in district school-choice programs. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others, over the mechanisms it replaced. In this paper, we introduce a new...

Allocation and exchange of discrete resources such as kidneys, school seats, and many other resources for which agents have single-unit demand is conducted via direct mechanisms without monetary transfers. Incentive compatibility and efficiency are primary concerns in designing such mechanisms....

Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms are willing to make early...

When aggregating individual preferences through the majority rule in an n-dimensional spatial voting model, the ‘worst-case’ scenario is a social choice configuration where no political equilibrium exists unless a super majority rate as high as 1 − 1/n is adopted. In this paper we assume...

Within the last decade kidney exchange has become a mainstream paradigm to increase the number of kidney transplants. However, compatible pairs do not participate, and the full benefit from exchange can be realized only if they do. In this paper, we propose a new incentive scheme that relies on...

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers representing children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE's operational challenges using case worker surveys and a regression analysis of data on child outcomes over multiple years. Using...