EITM: Matching: An Experimental Study

该项目将使用实验和模拟方法来检验匹配理论及其在择校、劳动力市场和婚姻市场中的应用。当一个公立学区采用“择校”时，通常一些学校会吸引更多的申请，而不是接受。因此，如何将学生与学校相匹配是公共政策的一个重要问题。实验研究将集中在三种可用于匹配学生和学校的算法上。第一种是波士顿机制，是目前使用中最常用和最突出的机制之一。除了波士顿机制之外，还有两种具有优越理论特性的替代方案——Gale-Shapley机制和顶部交易周期机制。我们的目标是评估哪种机制可能在现实世界中做得更好。该项目将使用实验室实验和广泛的计算机模拟来分析基本的学校选择问题和“控制选择”问题，当学校必须满足其招生特征的目标时（例如，在其招生中包括一定比例的低收入或少数民族学生）。来自实验的数据将提供对波士顿机制的第一个严格评估，以及对Gale-Shapley机制和学校选择环境中使用的顶级交易周期机制的评估。随着越来越多的州通过立法强制学区内或学区间的择校，为了提出有意义的政策建议，对波士顿机制以及其他机制进行评估是迫在眉睫的。这项研究的结果将立即对政策制定者有用。项目的其余部分将对三个数学模型进行实验研究，这些模型已被证明是劳动经济学、宏观经济学和货币理论中的有用工具。这些也是“匹配”模型；它们都考虑了一个带有搜索摩擦的分散匹配过程。实验研究将检验在完全理性假设放松时理论模型是否具有鲁棒性。他们还将研究影响均衡选择的因素，以及税收和补贴对这些模型中搜索和匹配的影响。这些模型已经被用来预测人们如何匹配现有的工作，以及人们如何找到婚姻伴侣。因此，这部分项目的结果应该会提高我们对税收和补贴如何影响职业和婚姻选择的理解。

This project will use experimental and simulation methods to examine matching theories and their applications to school choice, labor markets, and marriage markets.When a public school district adopts "school choice", generally some schools attract many more applications than they can accept. How to match students to schools is therefore an important question for public policy. The experimental studies will focus on three algorithms that could be used to match students to schools. The first, the Boston mechanism, is one of the most commonly used and prominent in current use. There are two alternatives to the Boston mechanism that have superior theoretical properties - the Gale-Shapley mechanism and the top trading cycles mechanism. The goal is to evaluate which mechanism is likely to do a better job in the real world. The project will use lab experiments and extensive computer simulations to analyze both the basic school choice problem and the "controlled choice" problem when schools must meet goals for their enrollment characteristics (for example, including a certain percentage of low-income or minority students in their enrollment). Data from the experiment will provide the first rigorous evaluation of the Boston mechanism, as well as an evaluation of the Gale-Shapley mechanism and the top trading cycles mechanism used in the school choice context. As more states have passed legislation mandating intra- or inter-district school choice, it is urgent to evaluate the Boston mechanism as well as alternative mechanisms in order to make meaningful policy recommendations. The results of this study will be immediately useful to policymakers.The rest of the project will conduct experimental studies of three mathematical models that have proven to be a useful tool in labor economics, macroeconomics and monetary theory. These are also "matching" models; they each consider a decentralized matching process with search frictions. The experimental studies will test whether the theoretical models are robust when the perfect rationality assumption is relaxed. They will also examine factors affecting equilibrium selection, as well as the effects of taxes and subsidies on search and matching in these models. The models have been used to predict how people match to available jobs and how people find marriage partners. The results of this part of the project should therefore improve our understanding of how taxes and subsidies will affect occupational and marriage choices.