Two-sided strategy-proofness in many-to-many matching markets

We study the existence of group strategy-proof stable rules in many-to-many matching markets under responsiveness of agents’ preferences. We show that when firms have acyclical preferences over workers the set of stable matchings is a singleton, and the worker-optimal stable mechanism is a stable and group strategy-proo frule for firms and workers. Furthermore, acyclicity is the minimal condition guaranteeing the existence of stable and strategy-proof mechanisms in many-to-many matching markets

Efficiency in Matching Markets with Regional Caps: The Case of the Japan Residency Matching Program

In an attempt to increase the placement of medical residents to rural hospitals, the Japanese government recently introduced "regional caps" which restrict the total number of residents matched within each region of the country. The government modified the deferred acceptance mechanism incorporating the regional caps. This paper shows that the current mechanism may result in avoidable ineffciency and instability and proposes a better mechanism that improves upon it in terms of effciency and stability while meeting the regional caps. More broadly, the paper contributes to the general research agenda of matching and market design to address practical problems.medical residency matching, regional caps, the rural hospital theorem, sta- bility, strategy-proofness, matching with contracts

Group strategy-proofness in private good economies

Altres ajuts: SGR2014-515 ; SGR2009-0189 ; 2014-SGR-1360; Junta de Andalucia: SEJ4941, SEJ-5980; ECO2011-29355Many salient rules to allocate private goods are not only strategyproof, but also group strategy-proof, in appropriate domains of definition, hence diminishing the traditional conflict between incentives and efficiency. That is so for solutions to matching, division, cost sharing, house allocation, and auctions, in spite of the substantive disparity between these cases. In a general framework encompassing all of them, we prove that the equivalence between the two forms of strategy-proofness is due to an underlying common structure that transcends the many differences between the contexts and the mechanisms for which it holds. (JEL C78, D44, D63, D71, D82)

Matching with Waiting Times: The German Entry-Level Labor Market for Lawyers

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used "Berlin" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not respect improvements. We introduce a mechanism based on the matching with contracts literature, using waiting time as the contractual term. The resulting mechanism is strategy-proof, weakly Pareto efficient, eliminates justified envy and respects improvements. We extend our proposed mechanism to allow for a more flexible allocation of positions over time

Essays on Environmental, Energy and Land Economics in China

This dissertation consists of three essays involving environmental pollution, electricity consumption, and farmland leasing in China. These economic analyses are linked by their inclusion of institutional changes which have occurred in China over the past half-century. The first essay examines the effects of environmental pollution and institutional abatement targets on real average housing prices in China. The Spatial Difference-In-Difference model shows that the overall effect of 2006 SO2 institutional abatement targets is to increase real average housing prices across provinces. The changes in both emissions of sulfur dioxide and industrial wastewater discharges have negative impacts on the change of real average housing prices. Essay two considers one of the most important issues in electricity consumption research, namely, the electricity consumption function. This research demonstrates that metropolitan electricity consumption is a function of economic output and electricity consumption habits along with the electricity demand management reform. Finally, the third essay develops a theoretical model to identify optimal farmland contracts. Under complete information, a fixed-rent contract is the optimal institutional arrangement from land lessor’s perspective. Conversely, a share contract is the best choice for land lessor under incomplete information. The empirical results show that the farmer who leases farmland to external individuals has a lower probability of choosing a fixed-rent contract. However, the farmer who leases farmland to internal individuals is less likely to choose a share contract

Improving Fairness and Efficiency in Matching with Distributional Constraints: An Alternative Solution for the Japanese Medical Residency Match

Regional imbalance of doctors is a serious issue in many countries. In an attempt to average the geographical distribution of doctors, the Japanese government introduced ``regional caps'' recently, restricting the total number of medical residents matched within each region. Motivated by this policy change, Kamada and Kojima (2013) proposed a mechanism called the flexible deferred acceptance mechanism (FDA) that makes every doctor weakly better off than the current system. In this paper, we further study this problem and develop an alternative mechanism that we call the priority-list based deferred acceptance mechanism (PLDA). Both mechanisms enable hospitals in the same region to fill their capacities flexibly until the regional cap is filled. FDA lets hospitals take turns to (tentatively) choose the best remaining doctor, while PLDA lets each region directly decide which doctor is (tentatively) matched with which hospital based on its priority list. We show that PLDA performs better than FDA in terms of efficiency and fairness through theoretical and computational analyses