Matching mechanisms and their application to school choice

Abstract

The talk will be an overview of mechanisms for the one-sided matching problem, also called the house-allocation problem. This and related problems serve as useful models for many allocation problems that arise in practice: prominent recent examples include organizing kidney exchanges and assigning students to schools. We'll briefly discuss these applications, and discuss a recent result that establishes the equivalence of a broad class of mechanisms to the uniform lottery mechanism (also called the random priority mechanism).