Matching Theory and College Admissions

该奖项资助了经济理论中匹配方法的研究。这项研究开发了分析双边匹配的新方法，无论它是通过分散的市场还是通过中央票据交换所组织的。这些项目将重点放在大学招生作为一种可能的应用上，尽管新的理论是普遍的，并将适用于许多其他背景。第一个项目建立了一个大学分散招生博弈的规范模型，分析了高校的战略收益管理决策，并对其均衡结果进行了评估。第二个项目使用了澳大利亚的数据，那里的大学招生集中在每个州。数据分析确定了这种集中过程的具体特征对由此产生的学生分配到大学的影响。第三个项目也是经济学理论；该团队寻求开发新的、更一般的条件，以确保在渐近意义上存在稳定的匹配；应用于大学招生，这将意味着随着经济的增长，学生数量和大学名额数量的增长，稳定的匹配。该项目的广泛影响包括对通过改变招生程序来鼓励大学入学的不同方式的优点和缺点的新见解。

This award funds research in the economic theory of matching methods. The research develops new methods for analyzing two-sided matching, whether it is organized via a decentralized market or a central clearinghouse. The projects focus on college admissions as a possible application, although the new theory is general and will apply to many other contexts. The first project develops a canonical model of a decentralized college admissions game, analyzes the strategic yield management decisions made by colleges and universities, and evaluates the resulting equilibrium outcomes. The second project uses data from Australia, where college admissions are centralized in each state. The data analysis determines the effect of specific features of this centralized process on the resulting assignment of students to universities. The third project is again economic theory; the team seeks to develop new and more general conditions that guarantee existence of stable matching in an asymptotic sense; as applied to college admissions this would mean a match that is stable as the economy grows in the number of students and in the number of college places.Broader impacts of this project include new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of encouraging college access through changes in admissions processes.