We present direct field evidence of preference misrepresentation under deferred acceptance. A large fraction of highly educated participants, who had been informed about the strategy-proof nature of the mechanism in numerous ways, failed to play truthfully: they ranked a non-funded position...

In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...

Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using preexisting institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: Dominant Individual Rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if every pre-existing strategy...

We study college admissions markets, where colleges offer multiple funding levels. Colleges wish to recruit the best-qualified students subject to budget and capacity constraints. Student-proposing deferred acceptance is stable and strategy-proof for students, but the set of stable allocations...

Since no stable matching mechanism can induce truth-telling as a dominant strategy for all participants, there is often room in matching markets for strategic misrepresentation (Roth). In this paper we study a natural form of strategic misrepresentation: reporting a truncation of one's true...

Many economic-theoretic models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. Such assumptions introduce a conceptual problem, as results that rely on finiteness are often implicitly nonrobust; for example, they may depend upon edge...

In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...