理论论文

We theoretically and experimentally study centralized college admissions in which colleges evaluate students under a ‘translucent’ admission system and students can learn each college’s suitability through costly information acquisition. In centralized matching via Gale and Shapley’s deferred acceptance algorithm, students decide whether to acquire information before submitting their rank-order lists. However, uncertainty about the final assignment lowers the expected gain from learning, thereby reducing social welfare, compared to a scenario without such uncertainty. Our experiments demonstrate that the welfare loss is greater with more opaque admission systems. The empirical social welfare obtained in our experimental treatments is consistently lower than the theoretical welfare, and we identify non-equilibrium learning as a main contributor.

We examine a unique auction format used in the Istanbul flower market, which could transform into either Dutch or English auction depending on bidders’ bidding behaviors. By introducing a time cost that reduces the value of a perishable good as time passes, we explore how this hybrid auction format accommodates the desire for speed via an adaptive starting price. We show that the Istanbul Flower Auction outperforms both the Dutch and English auctions in terms of the auctioneer’s utility. With numerical analysis, we also illustrate the Istanbul Flower Auction’s superiority in terms of social welfare and auction duration. Our results highlight the critical role of auction design in improving welfare when the duration of the auction process matters.

This paper analyzes the welfare properties of the mechanism Taiwan uses to match students to high schools. I study the Taiwan mechanism under a theoretical model where students share the same ordinal rankings, and a single lottery determines schools’ preferences. In this setting, all Taiwan mechanisms ex ante weakly Pareto dominate deferred acceptance for strategizing students. Additionally, in my model, there always exists a Taiwan mechanism that provides greater welfare than deferred acceptance to students who do not strategize. Using Cambridge Public School data, I demonstrate that the Taiwan mechanism outperforms deferred acceptance for a range of deduction rules.