Priority Blockers: Welfare and Incentives in Matching under General Constraints

2026-09-21

AI Summary

研究通过引入COP-and-Choose方法解决匹配问题中因优先级保护导致的阻塞问题，证明了其贪婪版本能保证学生福利不低于其他公平匹配机制。

Abstract

Institutions often face constraints richer than a single capacity. Protecting the priority of a student who cannot be accommodated may then block a lower-priority student who fits. We introduce COP-and-Choose, a cumulative offer process followed by a choice step, and show that its greedy version, which skips such blockers, leaves no student worse off than any fair matching or Knapsack Deferred Acceptance (KDA). Greedy is the unique consistent rule preserving this guarantee. With substitutability and size monotonicity at every school, greedy is strategy-proof and Pareto-undominated among strategy-proof mechanisms. If either fails at a school, one additional capacity-one school yields a market where, under every proposal order, greedy is manipulable and no strategy-proof mechanism weakly Pareto dominates it. In a three-resource refugee-resettlement calibration with simulated preferences, 19--33 percent of families gain relative to KDA and none lose, while 21--83 percent strongly envy another family.

Problem

• matching
• priority
• constraints
• fairness
• efficiency

Innovation

• COP-and-Choose
• greedy version
• strategy-proof
• Pareto-undominated
• Knapsack Deferred Acceptance (KDA)