Professor Atila Abdulkadiroglu in the American Economic Review

Professor Atila Abdulkadiroglu in the American Economic Review

01 February 2010 12:00AM

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, who researches mechanism design, market design and the economics of education, had an article published in the December 2009 issue of the American Economic Review (AER) and has had another paper accepted by the AER for publication. 

Learn more about Professor Abdulkadiroglu by visiting his profile page and reading the abstracts of his two papers below.

Published in December 2009 issue of the AER:

Title: Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match (joint with Parag Pathak and Alvin E. Roth)

Abstract: The design of the New York City (NYC) high school match involved trade-offs among efficiency, stability, and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences-ties-in school preferences. Simulations with field data and the theory favor breaking indifferences the same way at every school-single tiebreaking-in a student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism. Any inefficiency associated with a realized tiebreaking cannot be removed without harming student incentives. Finally, we empirically document the extent of potential efficiency loss associated with strategy-proofness and stability, and direct attention to some open questions.

Additional paper accepted for publication at the AER:

Title: Resolving Conflicting Preferences in School Choice: The "Boston" Mechanism Reconsidered (joint paper with Yeon-Koo Che and Yosuke Yasuda)

Abstract: Despite its widespread use, the Boston mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances compared to the Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance algorithm (henceforth, DA). By contrast, when students have the same ordinal preferences and schools have no priorities, we find that the Boston mechanism Pareto dominates the DA in ex ante welfare, that it may not harm but rather benefit participants who may not strategize well, and that, in the presence of school priorities, the Boston mechanism also tends to facilitate greater access than the DA to good schools for those lacking priorities at those schools