The paper analyzes the scope for manipulation in many-to-one matching markets (college admission problems) under the student-optimal stable mechanism when the number of participants is large and the length of the preference list is bounded. Under a mild independence assumption on the...

Drawing on classical insights from mechanism design, we show that ex post efficient mechanisms induce agents to make efficient ex ante investment choices if and only if they are strategy-proof. For mechanisms that fail to be exactly strategy-proof and/or efficient, we derive a correspondence...

The random priority (random serial dictatorship) mechanism is a common method for assigning objects to individuals. The mechanism is easy to implement and strategy-proof. However this mechanism is inefficient, as the agents may be made all better off by another mechanism that increases their...

We develop a theory of monotone comparative statics based on weak set order, or in short, weak monotone comparative statics, and identify the enabling conditions in the context of individual choices, Pareto optimal choices for a coalition of agents, and Nash equilibria of games. Compared with...

We develop a theory of monotone comparative statics based on weak set order, or in short weak monotone comparative statics, and identify the enabling conditions in the context of individual choices, Pareto optimal choices for a coalition of agents, and Nash equilibria of games. Compared with the...

Accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists, because couples view pairs of jobs as complements. A stable matching may not exist when couples are present. We find conditions under which a stable...

The Boston mechanism is a popular student-placement mechanism in school-choice programs around the world. We provide two characterizations of the Boston mechanism. We introduce two new axioms; favoring higher ranks and rank-respecting invariance. A mechanism is the Boston mechanism for some...

Roth is the major force in creating a vibrant field of matching theory and its application to market design. In doing so, he has discovered many properties of the stable matching problem (especially from the strategic viewpoint of game theory), studied real-life cases to test the relevance of...

We consider the many-to-many two-sided matching problem under a stringent domain restriction on preferences called the max-min criterion. We show that, even under this restriction, there is no stable mechanism that is weakly Pareto efficient, strategy-proof, or monotonic (i.e. respects...

In this paper, we consider two-sided, many-to-one matching problems where agents in one side of the market (schools) impose some distributional constraints (e.g., a maximum quota for a set of schools), and develop a strategyproof mechanism that can handle a very general class of distributional...