Strategyproofness-Exposing Descriptions of Matching Mechanisms
Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Ori Heffetz, Clayton Thomas · National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023
A menu description presents a mechanism to player i in two steps.Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i's menu: the set of i's potential outcomes.Step (2) uses i's report to select i's favorite outcome from her menu.Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity?We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance.We prove that-in contrast with other common matching mechanismsthis menu description must differ substantially from the corresponding traditional description.We demonstrate, with a lab experiment on two elementary mechanisms, the promise and challenges of menu descriptions.