Adam Smith Business School

Dr Jorgen Kratz, University of York

"Weak misrepresentations in college admissions"
Tuesday, 19 December. 4 pm
Room 141 Adam Smith Business School

Abstract

The literature on admissions mechanisms for schools and universities typically focuses on "strategy-proof" mechanisms. These are mechanisms that assign, e.g., students to universities in a way that students' best application strategy is to rank the universities in accordance with their true preferences. Students may misrepresent their true preferences in a number of ways, but no such misrepresentations can get the student admitted into a more desirable university under a strategy-proof mechanism. We focus on a certain type of misrepresentation, "weak misrepresentations", and mechanisms with the property that students who use weak misrepresentations are admitted into to the same university they would have been under truthtelling. We show that a mechanism is strategy-proof if and only if it satisfies this property. The usefulness of this characterisation is highlighted by deriving a new result showing that "re-matching mechanisms" are never strategy-proof, and by providing a simple new proof of the strategy-proofness of a well-studied mechanism.

Bio

Jorgen is a lecturer at the University of York (Department of Economics and Related Studies) specialising in matching and market design. His research covers topics such as kidney exchange, college admissions, object allocation problems and matching with contracts.

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First published: 30 October 2023