Universität zu Köln

Chen, Yiqiu (2022). Essays on Incentives in Matching Markets. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

Starting with the celebrated work by Gale and Shapley (1962), the literature on matching theory and its applications has developed greatly over the last decades. The way how resources are allocated in practice has been optimized based on theoretical and empirical findings in this field. Participants' preferences are critical to achieve allocations with desirable properties in matching market. However, true preferences are usually private information that is not known by central authorities which are responsible for the matching procedures. Therefore, an important concern in designing matching rules is to provide incentives to participants such that they reveal their preferences truthfully. This thesis consists of three theoretical essays dealing with various incentive properties in matching markets. In particular, these essays focus on incentive analysis in different centralized matching environments, and they aim to provide a better understanding of how people's incentives of behaving truthfully can be influenced by factors including observable information, revelation principles and their abilities to perform contingent reasoning. Overall, the results from the three essays presented in this thesis gain new insights into when and how participants will be incentivized to behave truthfully under various matching rules and mechanisms. First, although not being strategy-proof, the Efficiency Adjusted Deferred Acceptance Rule (Kesten, 2010) still provides participants with reasonably strong incentives to report truthfully considering the information participants usually obtain in practice. Second, a promising complementary solution to obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms (Li, 2017) could be the mechanisms that comply with obvious dominance whenever possible and minimize the amount of information revealed from participants. Third, to understand that a rule is strategy-proof, people must reason to the degree such that there remains no uncertainty about their own assignments. These works add to the literature on incentive studies in matching theory as well as to the literature on their applications.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Chen, Yiqiu chen@wiso.uni-koeln.de UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-622082
Date:	24 June 2022
Place of Publication:	Cologne, Germany
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Management, Economy and Social Sciences
Divisions:	Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences > Economics > Microeconomics, Institutions and markets > Professorship 2 for Economics Behavior und Design
Subjects:	Economics
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language Matching English Market Design English Mechanism Design English Incentive English
Date of oral exam:	18 March 2022
Referee:	Name Academic Title Westkamp, Alexander Prof. Dr. Schottmüller, Christoph Prof. Dr.
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/62208