The Limits of Incentives in Economic Matching Procedures
在以色列心理学研究生录取中，策略性防操纵的匹配机制下，申请人仍会误报对资助的偏好，且较弱申请人更易误报，这对匹配程序的设计者与研究者有重要启示。
Organizations often require agents’ private information to achieve critical goals such as efficiency or revenue maximization, but frequently it is not in the agents’ best interest to reveal this information. Strategy-proof mechanisms give agents incentives to truthfully report their private information. In the context of matching markets, they eliminate agents’ incentives to misrepresent their preferences. We present direct field evidence of preference misrepresentation under the strategy-proof deferred acceptance in a high-stakes matching environment. We show that applicants to graduate programs in psychology in Israel often report that they prefer to avoid receiving funding, even though the mechanism preserves privacy and funding comes with no strings attached and constitutes a positive signal of ability. Surveys indicate that other kinds of preference misrepresentation are also prevalent. Preference misrepresentation in the field is associated with weaker applicants. Our findings have important implications for practitioners designing matching procedures and for researchers who study them. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, decision analysis.