Non-revelation mechanisms in many-to-one markets

Abstract

This paper presents a sequential admission mechanism where students are allowed to send multiple applications to colleges and colleges sequentially decide the applicants to enroll. The irreversibility of agents decisions and the sequential structure of the enrollments make truthful behavior a dominant strategy for colleges. Due to these features, the mechanism implements the set of stable matchings in Subgame Perfect Nash equilibrium. We extend the analysis to a mechanism where colleges make proposals to potential students and students decide sequentially. We show that this mechanism implements the stable set as well.