Author: Onur Burak CelikPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Essays on Matching Markets with Correlated Preferences
Author: Onur Burak CelikEssays on the Analysis and Implications of Two-sided Matching Markets
Author: James W. BoudreauEssays on Matching Markets
Author: Alexander WestkampEssays on Matching Theory and Behavioral Market Design
Author: Siqi PanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 112
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on the design and implementation of matching markets where transfers are not available, such as college admissions, school choice, and certain labor markets. The results contribute to the literature from both a theoretical and a behavioral perspective, and may have policy implications for the design of some real-life matching markets. Chapter 1, “Exploding Offers and Unraveling in Two-Sided Matching Markets,” studies the unraveling problem prevalent in many two-sided matching markets that occurs when transactions become inefficiently early. In a two-period decentralized model, I examine whether the use of exploding offers can affect agents' early moving incentives. The results show that when the culture of the market allows firms to make exploding offers, unraveling is more likely to occur, leading to a less socially desirable matching outcome. A market with an excess supply of labor is less vulnerable to the presence of exploding offers; yet the conclusion is ambiguous for a market with a greater degree of uncertainty in early stages, which depends on the specific information structure. While a policy banning exploding offers tends to be supported by high quality firms and workers, it can be opposed by those of lower quality. This explains the prevalence of exploding offers in practice. Chapter 2, “Constrained School Choice and Information Acquisition,” investigates a common practice of many school choice programs in the field, where the length of students' submitted preference lists are constrained. In an environment where students have incomplete information about others’ preferences, I theoretically study the effect of such a constraint under both a Deferred Acceptance mechanism (DA) and a Boston mechanism (BOS). The result shows that ex-ante stability can only be ensured under an unconstrained DA, but not under a constrained DA, an unconstrained BOS, or a constrained BOS. In a lab experiment, I find that the constraint also affects students’ information acquisition behavior. Specifically, when faced with a constraint, students tend to acquire less wasteful information and distribute more efforts to acquire relevant information under DA; such an effect is not significant under BOS. Overall, the constraint has a negative effect on efficiency and stability under both mechanisms. Chapter 3, “Targeted Advertising on Competing Platforms,” is jointly written with Huanxing Yang. We investigate targeted advertising in two-sided markets. Each of the two competing platforms has single-homing consumers on one side and multi-homing advertising firms on the other. We focus on how asymmetry in platforms’ targeting abilities translates into asymmetric equilibrium outcomes, and how changes in targeting ability affect the price and volume of ads, consumer welfare, and advertising firms' profits. We also compare social incentives and equilibrium incentives in investing in targeting ability. Chapter 4, “The Instability of Matching with Overconfident Agents: Laboratory and Field Investigations,” focuses on centralized college admissions markets where students are evaluated and allocated based on their performance on a standardized exam. A single exam’s measurement error causes the exam-based priorities to deviate from colleges' aptitude-based preferences: a student who underperforms in one exam may lose her placement at a preferred college to someone with a lower aptitude. The previous literature proposes a solution of combining a Boston algorithm with pre-exam preference submission. Under the assumption that students have perfect knowledge of their relative aptitudes before taking the exam, the suggested mechanism intends to trigger a self-sorting process, with students of higher (lower) aptitudes targeting more (less) preferred colleges. However, in a laboratory experiment, I find that such a self-sorting process is skewed by overconfidence, which leads to a welfare loss larger than the purported benefits. Moreover, the mechanism introduces unfairness by rewarding overconfidence and punishing underconfidence, thus serving as a gender penalty for women. I also analyze field data from Chinese high schools; the results suggest similar conclusions as in the lab.
Essays on Matching Markets
Author: Benjamín Tello BravoEssays on dynamic matching markets
Author: Morimitsu KurinoEssays on Matching Markets
Author: Essays on Signaling and Matching
Author: Peter A. ColesEssays on Market Design and Experimental Economics
Author: Eric Samuel MayefskyPublisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 106
Book Description
I explore fundamental behavioral aspects of several market design environments in a variety of projects using both theoretical models and laboratory experiments. I show that human tendencies can drastically shift potential outcomes away from those which would result if individuals were fully 'rational' and unbiased in decision problems similar to those found frequently in the field. I explore two common classes of centralized matching mechanisms--Deferred Acceptance and Priority--which have wildly different success rates in practice despite both being open to manipulation by agents who have incomplete information about the other participants in the match. For this reason, theory predicts both mechanisms in equilibrium will yield match outcomes which are unstable, meaning some agents will desire to renegotiate with one another after receiving their match assignments, and thus reduce participants' confidence in using the match. I provide laboratory evidence that out-of-equilibrium truth telling by agents is substantially more frequent in the Deferred Acceptance environment and thus Deferred Acceptance matches will generally be more stable in practice than matches using a Priority mechanism. This may explain why Deferred Acceptance mechanisms appear to be more viable in the field. I also explore two different models of decentralized two-sided matching environments where establishing scarce signaling methods can improve market outcomes. In a laboratory experiment, I show that allowing potential receiving job offers to send a single signal to their favorite potential employer before job offers are made increases overall match rates in the market, but is potentially damaging to the firms making offers when compared to the market without such a signal. Then, in a theoretical model where pre-offer communication takes the form of an interview process where workers have natural limits on the number of interviews in which they can participate, I show that in many cases firms can benefit themselves and the market as a whole by voluntarily restricting the number of interviews they offer to participate in. While not traditionally thought of as market design problems, voting mechanisms are fundamentally goods allocation problems as well and have many of the same issues as traditional markets do. I explore the effects of voter bias on outcomes in an otherwise standard voting model and find that even slight external pressure on individuals in a committee tasked with coming to a collective decision can destroy the ability of that committee to arrive at the correct result, even when individuals have good information about the best decision to make. Furthermore, the quality of the decision made by such a committee can actually degrade as the committee size increases, in contrast with the canonical Condorcet Jury Theorem which predicts that a committee's ability to choose the right outcome increases quickly as more members are added.
Market Structure and Dynamics
Author: Qingyun Wu (Researcher in game theory and market design)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
This thesis consists of three self-contained essays that investigate the algebraic structure of matching markets and the stabilization dynamics in decentralized markets. Chapter 2 is based on Wu and Roth (2018). It studies envy-free matchings that naturally arise from workers retiring or companies expanding. We show that the set of envy-free matchings forms a lattice that has a Conway-like join, but not a Conway-like meet. Furthermore, a job hopping process in which companies make offers to their favorite blocking workers, and workers accept their favorite offers, producing a sequence of vacancy chains, is a Tarski operator on this lattice. The fixed points of this Tarski operator correspond to the set of stable matchings; and the steady state matching starting from any given initial state is derived analytically. Chapter 3 is based on Wu (2020). The goal of this chapter, is to provide a systematic approach for analyzing entering classes in the college admissions model. When dealing with a many-to-one matching model, we often convert it into a one-to-one matching problem by assigning each seat of a college to a single student, instead of matching each college to multiple students. The preferences in this new model are significantly correlated and severely restrict the possible changes to entering classes. Through the so-called "rotations" that correspond to the join-irreducible elements in the lattice of stable matchings, we present a unified treatment for several results on entering classes, including the famous "Rural Hospital Theorem". We also show that, the least preferred student in an entering class appears to play a very interesting role. For example, each entering class can be completely characterized by its worst student. Chapter 4 is based on Gu, Roth, and Wu (2020). The motivating question is that, how come some black markets, such as the market for hitmen are well-regulated, but many others like the market for drugs are far from being under our control, even though we try very hard to eliminate them. To understand this, we build a three-dimensional discrete time Markov chain to study how black markets evolve over time, focusing on social repugnance and search frictions. We borrow tools from Markov jump processes, random walks, exponential martingales and optional sampling theory to analyze both the steady state limit and the realizations along the way. In the first part of the chapter, we identify conditions that lead to market survival or extinction. And the second part studies speed of convergence. We show that if a market is going to die eventually, then it dies exponentially fast. This further implies if a market has survived for a long time, then it is likely to survive forever.