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Matching & Allocation — Zurich Center for Market Design

Matching & Resource Allocation

Designing Fair and Efficient Mechanisms

Overview

Mechanisms without money

How do we allocate scarce, indivisible resources when prices aren't available — or aren't enough? From school seats and organ exchanges to roommate assignments and public housing, many real-world settings call for allocation methods beyond simple market pricing.

Matching and Allocation

Research Papers

At the Zurich Center for Market Design, we use matching theory and mechanism design to tackle these challenges — balancing fairness, efficiency, and incentives.

Below, we showcase a selection of our recent research exploring how allocation mechanisms perform — and how they can be improved.

Competitive Combinatorial Exchange

Simon Jantschgi, Thanh Nguyen, Alex Teytelboym

Many markets involve the exchange of bundles of indivisible goods without money — such as organ exchanges, time banks, and shift swaps. This paper studies the design of fair and efficient combinatorial exchanges for such settings.

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A Theory of Simplicity in Games and Mechanism Design

Marek Pycia, Peter Troyan

When do mechanisms remain intuitive and easy to use, even with limited foresight? This paper develops a theory of simplicity in extensive-form games and characterizes mechanisms that are simple, efficient, and fair across domains.

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Matching with Externalities

Marek Pycia, M. Bumin Yenmez

How do stable matchings work when agents care not just about their own outcomes, but also others'? This paper generalizes matching theory to environments with externalities and characterizes the conditions under which stable outcomes exist.

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Ordinal Simplicity in Discrete Mechanism Design

Marek Pycia, M. Utku Ünver

When money isn't used, mechanisms often rely on ordinal preferences. This paper investigates when such mechanisms are sufficient, and characterizes the class of ordinal mechanisms that are strategy-proof, fair, and efficient.

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