Matching Theory and College Admissions

该奖项资助匹配方法的经济理论研究。该研究开发了分析双边匹配的新方法，无论是通过分散的市场还是中央清算所组织的。这些项目将重点放在大学录取上，作为一种可能的应用，尽管新理论是通用的，将适用于许多其他情况。第一个项目建立了一个分散高校招生博弈的规范模型，分析了高校的战略收益管理决策，并评估了由此产生的均衡结果。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学生分配到大学的结果的影响。第三个项目还是经济理论；该团队试图开发新的和更一般的条件，以保证在渐近意义上存在稳定匹配；如果应用到大学录取中，这意味着随着经济在学生数量和大学名额上的增长，这种匹配是稳定的。该项目的更广泛影响包括对通过改变招生流程来鼓励进入大学的不同方式的优缺点的新见解。

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.