Fuhito Kojima

Incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism

The probabilistic serial mechanism (Bogomolnaia and Moulin, 2001 [9]) is ordinally efficient but not strategy-proof. We study incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism for large assignment problems. We establish that for a fixed set of object types and an agent with a given expected utility function, if there are sufficiently many copies of each object type, then reporting ordinal preferences truthfully is a weakly dominant strategy for the agent (regardless of the number of other agents and their preferences). The non-manipulability and the ordinal efficiency of the probabilistic serial mechanism support its implementation instead of random serial dictatorship in large assignment problems.

Asymptotic Equivalence of Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms

The random priority (random serial dictatorship) mechanism is a common method for assigning objects to individuals. The mechanism is easy to implement and strategy-proof. However this mechanism is inefficient, as the agents may be made all better off by another mechanism that increases their chances of obtaining more preferred objects. Such an inefficiency is eliminated by the recent mechanism called probabilistic serial, but this mechanism is not strategy-proof. Thus, which mechanism to employ in practical applications has been an open question. This paper shows that these mechanisms become equivalent when the market becomes large. More specifically, given a set of object types, the random assignments in these mechanisms converge to each other as the number of copies of each object type approaches infinity. Thus, the inefficiency of the random priority mechanism becomes small in large markets. Our result gives some rationale for the common use of the random priority mechanism in practical problems such as student placement in public schools.

Random assignment of multiple indivisible objects

We consider random assignment of multiple indivisible objects. When each agent receives one object, [Bogomolnaia, A., Moulin, H., 2001. A new solution to the random assignment problem. Journal of Economic Theory 100, 295-328] show that the probabilistic serial mechanism is ordinally efficient, envy-free and weakly strategy-proof. When each agent receives more than one object, we propose a generalized probabilistic serial mechanism that is ordinally efficient and envy-free but not weakly strategy-proof. Our main result shows that, if each agent receives more than one object, there exists no mechanism that is ordinally efficient, envy-free and weakly strategy-proof.

Axioms for Deferred Acceptance

The deferred acceptance algorithm is often used to allocate indivisible objects when monetary transfers are not allowed. We provide two characterizations of agent-proposing deferred acceptance allocation rules. Two new axioms-individually rational monotonicity and weak Maskin monotonicity-are essential to our analysis. An allocation rule is the agent-proposing deferred acceptance rule for some acceptant substitutable priority if and only if it satisfies non-wastefulness and individually rational monotonicity. An alternative characterization is in terms of non-wastefulness, population monotonicity, and weak Maskin monotonicity. We also offer an axiomatization of the deferred acceptance rule generated by an exogenously specified priority structure. We apply our results to characterize efficient deferred acceptance rules. Copyright 2010 The Econometric Society.

School choice: Impossibilities for affirmative action

This paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice. We show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority student – the purported beneficiaries – under any stable matching mechanism. Furthermore, we show that another famous mechanism, the top trading cycles mechanism, suffers from the same drawback.

Random Paths to Pairwise Stability in Many-to-Many Matching Problems: A Study on Market Equilibration

This paper considers a decentralized process in many-to-many matching problems. We show that if agents on one side of the market have substitutable preferences and those on the other side have responsive preferences, then, from an arbitrary matching, there exists a finite path of matchings such that each matching on the path is formed by satisfying a blocking individual or a blocking pair for the previous matching, and the final matching is pairwise-stable. This implies that an associated stochastic process converges to a pairwise-stable matching in finite time with probability one, if each blocking individual or pair is satisfied with a positive probability at each period along the process.

Mixed Strategies in Games of Capacity Manipulation in Hospital–Intern Markets

We investigate games of capacity manipulation in hospital-intern markets as proposed by Konishi and Ünver (Soc Choice Welfare, in press). While Konishi and Ünver (Soc Choice Welfare, in press) show that there may not exist a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in general, there exists a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium in such a game. We show that every hospital weakly prefers a Nash equilibrium to any “larger” capacity profiles, whether the equilibrium is in pure or mixed strategies. In particular, a Nash equilibrium is weakly preferred by hospitals to the outcome that results from truthful reporting.

Anti-Coordination Games And Dynamic Stability

We introduce the class of anti-coordination games. A symmetric two-player game is said to have the anti-coordination property if, for any mixed strategy, any worst response to the mixed strategy is in the support of the mixed strategy. Every anti-coordination game has a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium, which lies in the interior of the set of mixed strategies. We investigate the dynamic stability of the equilibrium in a one-population setting. Specifically we focus on the best response dynamic (BRD), where agents in a large population take myopic best responses, and the perfect foresight dynamic (PFD), where agents maximize total discounted payoffs from the present to the future. For any anti-coordination game we show (i) that, for any initial distribution, BRD has a unique solution, which reaches the equilibrium in a finite time, (ii) that the same path is one of the solutions to PFD, and (iii) that no path escapes from the equilibrium in PFD once the path reaches the equilibrium. Moreover we show (iv) that, in some subclasses of anti-coordination games, for any initial state, any solution to PFD converges to the equilibrium. All the results for PFD hold for any discount rate.

Designing matching mechanisms under constraints: An approach from discrete convex analysis

In this paper, we consider two-sided, many-to-one matching problems where agents in one side of the market (hospitals) impose some distributional constraints (e.g., a minimum quota for each hospital). We show that when the preference of the hospitals is represented as an M-natural-concave function, the following desirable properties hold: (i) the time complexity of the generalized GS mechanism is O(|X|^3), where |X| is the number of possible contracts, (ii) the generalized Gale & Shapley (GS) mechanism is strategyproof, (iii) the obtained matching is stable, and (iv) the obtained matching is optimal for the agents in the other side (doctors) within all stable matchings. Furthermore, we clarify sufficient conditions where the preference becomes an M-natural-concave function. These sufficient conditions are general enough so that they can cover most of existing works on strategyproof mechanisms that can handle distributional constraints in many-to-one matching problems. These conditions provide a recipe for non-experts in matching theory or discrete convex analysis to develop desirable mechanisms in such settings.

Risk-dominance and perfect foresight dynamics in N-player games

Abstract In perfect foresight dynamics, an action is linearly stable if expectation that people will always choose the action is self-fulfilling. A symmetric game is a PIM game if an opponents particular action maximizes the incentive of an action, independently of the rest of the players. This class includes supermodular games, games with linear incentives and so forth. We show that, in PIM games, linear stability is equivalent to u-dominance, a generalization of risk-dominance, and that there is no path escaping a u-dominant equilibrium. Existing results on N-player coordination games, games with linear incentives and two-player games are obtained as corollaries.