the structure of residential energy demand in greece abstract this paper attempts to shed light on the determinants of residential energy demand in greece and to compare it with some other oecd countries from the estimates of the short run and long run elasticities of energy demand for the period 1965 1999 we find that residential energy demand appears to be price inelastic also we do not find evidence of a structural change probably because of the low efficiency of the energy sector we find however that the magnitude of the income elasticity varies substantially between greece and other oecd countries

broadening the market design approach to school choice school choice refers to policies that allow parents preferences to be an input to the decision of which school a student will attend a rich body of research has developed over the past 10 15 years to study mechanisms that implement school choice this literature has mostly taken the inputs of school choice preferences priorities and capacities as exogenous more recently researchers have sought to embed the school choice problem into its wider context thereby broadening the scope of market design questions and enriching the analysis this article discusses current school choice policy issues in light of this recent literature and outlines remaining open questions

capital as a layer cake a systems approach to capital and its multi level structure abstract we elaborate a systems approach to the nature of capital that develops the work of menger and lachmann the ml trajectory we propose a layer cake metaphor to capture the kernel of the ml approach and contrast it with the neoclassical metaphor of capital as an amorphous homogeneous jelly according to the ml approach capital is combinatorial and is organized structurally and relationally the approach examines capital as it exists out there in the world as it is actually formed and experienced by entrepreneurs capital goods only exist and become productive once they are connected in entrepreneurs production plans so that the focus is upon relations of complementarity between heterogeneous capital goods as used in production hence capital has a layered structure there is a nested hierarchy of capital goods capital combinations and economy wide capital structures using bunge s theory of systems we investigate how each of these entities is a concrete system at a different layer of economic reality both capital combinations and overall capital structure arise in an irreversible causal genetic process in real time and capital structure has the added distinction of being an emergent spontaneous order

policy options for the split incentive increasing energy efficiency for low income renters the split incentive problem concerns the lack of appropriate incentives to implement energy efficiency measures in particular low income tenants face a phenomenon of energy poverty in which they allocate significantly more of their household income to energy expenditures than other renters this problem is substantial affecting 1 89 of all united states energy use if effectively addressed it would create a range of savings between 4 and 11 billion dollars per year for many of the nation s poorest residents we argue that a carefully designed program of incentives for participants including landlords in conjunction with a unique type of utility managed on bill financing mechanism has significant potential to solve many of the complications we focus on three kinds of split incentives five concerns inherent to addressing split incentive problems scale endurance incentives savings political disfavor and provide a detailed policy proposal designed to surpass those problems with a particular focus on low income tenants in a u s context

two further impossibility results on responsive affirmative action in school choice abstract this paper investigates the responsiveness of priority based affirmative action in school choice we consider two efficiency improved mechanisms kesten s eadam efficiency adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism and da ttc mechanism running deferred acceptance and then running top trading cycles algorithm we show that neither eadam nor da ttc is minimally responsive to the priority based affirmative action policy that is under eadam or da ttc there are market situations in which a stronger affirmative action policy may result in a pareto inferior assignment for the minority students

the impossibility of extending random dictatorship to weak preferences random dictatorship has been characterized as the only social decision scheme that satisfies efficiency and strategyproofness when individual preferences are strict we show that no extension of random dictatorship to weak preferences satisfies these properties even when significantly weakening the required degree of strategyproofness

measuring energy poverty in greece a comprehensive research in the field of energy poverty is undertaken in this paper in an attempt to highlight the great vulnerability of greek households on energy poverty in the middle of a severe economic crisis till now greek energy policy has been considered insufficient to tackle energy poverty issues as focusing mainly on short term rather than permanent solutions a primary survey has been conducted recording objective data of energy expenses as well as subjective perceptions about housing conditions the findings showed that under the objective expenditure based method 58 of greek households are energy poor among households under the poverty threshold the energy poverty rate exceeds 90 existing and new subjective indicators shed light on other aspects of energy poverty such as the level of thermal comfort at home damp problems detected restriction of other essential needs in order to manage energy payments etc some interesting conclusions are also drawn by exploring the relationship between various indicators it appears that households considered energy poor are not identical when examined by objective and subjective indicators however different indicators complement each other by capturing different aspects of the problem and provide a broader overview of the issue

fair implementation of diversity in school choice many school districts have objectives regarding how students of different races ethnicity or religious backgrounds should be distributed across schools a growing literature in mechanism design is introducing school choice mechanisms that attempt to satisfy those requirements we show that mechanisms based on the student proposing deferred acceptance may fail to satisfy those objectives but that by using instead the school proposing deferred acceptance together with a choice function used by the schools which incorporates a preference for satisfying them can optimally approximate the diversity objectives while still satisfying an appropriate fairness criterion we provide analytical results which show that the proposed mechanism has a general ability to satisfy those objectives as opposed to some currently proposed mechanisms which may yield segregated assignments

a field study on matching with network externalities we study the effects of network externalities within a protocol for matching faculty to offices in a new building using web and survey data on faculty s attributes and choices we identify the different layers of the social network institutional affiliation coauthorships and friendships we quantify the effects of network externalities on choices and outcomes disentangle the layers of the networks and quantify their relative influence finally we assess the protocol used from a welfare perspective our study suggests the importance and feasibility of accounting for network externalities in assignment problems and evaluates techniques that can be employed to this end jel c78 c93 d62 d85 z13

from simplistic to complex systems in economics the applicability of complex systems theory in economics is evaluated and compared with standard approaches to economic theorising based upon constrained optimisation a complex system is defined in the economic context and differentiated from complex systems in physio chemical and biological settings it is explained why it is necessary to approach economic analysis from a network rather than a production and utility function perspective when we are dealing with complex systems it is argued that much of heterodox thought particularly in neo schumpeterian and neo austrian evolutionary economics can be placed within a complex systems perspective upon the economy the challenge is to replace prevailing simplistic theories based in constrained optimisation with simple theories derived from network representations in which value is created through the establishment of new connections between elements

the effect of house energy efficiency programs on the extensive and intensive margin of lower income households investment behavior abstract this paper examines the biggest house energy efficiency retrofit support program in greece which ran during 2011 2015 and approximately fifty thousand households participated we take advantage of an exogenous policy change resulting in cost reduction for households that occurred while the program was running this change substantially increased the subsidy rate for lower income households we find that this effective cost reduction increased the participation rate extensive margin we add to the literature on retrofits by further showing that this change increased substantially the investment amount intensive margin of these lower income households detailed data on a sub sample of households reveal that this increase was driven primarily by window replacement and thermal insulation investments

the kinetics of capital formation and economic organisation we examine the inseparability of capital formation and economic organisation in capitalist economic systems capital possesses a complex multilevel micro meso macro structure that is always in the process of transformation levels of the capital structure are interdependent and interactive correspondingly economic organisation at these various levels is not an independent entity in itself it occurs as a by product and structural aspect of capital formation rather than the transaction our focal unit of analysis is a production notion the capital combination that emanates from the kinetic organisation of material by human agency we consider the behaviour of entrepreneurs as causal agents in specifying and appraising potential capital combinations reorganising production and scrapping capital entrepreneurs combinatorial actions often change existing materials to serve functions for which they were not originally designed thereby changing capital structures and the shape and boundaries of economic organisation at different levels of economic complexity capital is created in a dynamic knowledge generation process that depends on entrepreneurs perceptions of gaps in the capital structure copyright the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

determinants of households space heating type a discrete choice analysis for german households abstract considering the increasing attention on efficient use of energy it becomes vitally important to understand the energy related behavior of households this article presents empirical evidence on the determinants of the space heating technology applied by a household three sets of variables are examined as potential influences building socio economic and regional characteristics to highlight both the differences and similarities the results are obtained from a sample of house owners and from a sample including all households the influence of socio economic factors is similar across these groups income is found to exert only a minor impact on the system choice dwelling features are significant in determining the heating type particularly in the sample including all households regional effects are important clear differences prevail between east and west germany

affirmative actions the boston mechanism case we consider three popular affirmative action policies in school choice quota based priority based and reserve based affirmative actions the boston mechanism bm is responsive to the latter two policies in that a stronger priority based or reserve based affirmative action makes some minority student better off however a stronger quota based affirmative action may yield a pareto inferior outcome for the minority under the bm these positive results disappear once we look for a stronger welfare consequence on the minority or focus on bm equilibrium outcomes

free riding on tax credits for home insulation in france an econometric assessment using panel data abstract this econometric study assesses the efficiency of the income tax credit system introduced in france in 2005 on investment decisions for household retrofits focusing on insulation measures a logit model with random individual effects is estimated using an unbalanced panel of 23 879 households surveyed over the period 2002 2011 an estimation in difference is performed to identify the impact of the policy the tax credit is found to have had no significant effect during the first two years suggesting a latency period related to inertia in households investment decisions possibly due to the complexity of the tax credit scheme the tax credit had an increasing significant positive effect from 2007 to 2010 before slightly decreasing in 2011 this is in line with changes in the tax credit rates suggesting a correlation with the level of subsidy defined as the situation in which the subsidized household would have invested even in the absence of the subsidy free ridership progressively decreased over the period was lower for insulation of opaque surfaces roofs walls etc than for insulation of windows and depended on individual characteristics the estimated average proportion of free riders varies between 40 and 85 after 2006 in addition we assess the potential bias caused by time varying unobservable variables and conclude that our estimates of the impacts of the policy are conservative

affirmative action through minority reserves an experimental study on school choice abstract minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by hafalir et al 2013 in the context of school choice in a laboratory experiment we find that adding minority reserves to the gs and ttc mechanisms has positive effects on stability but is quite disappointing in terms of efficiency also gs induces higher rates of truth telling by minority students and thus outclasses ttc

group incentive compatibility for matching with contracts abstract hatfield and milgrom hatfield john william milgrom paul r 2005 matching with contracts amer econ rev 95 913 935 present a unified model of matching with contracts which includes the standard two sided matching and some package auction models as special cases they show that the doctor optimal stable mechanism is strategy proof for doctors if hospitals preferences satisfy substitutes and the law of aggregate demand we show that the doctor optimal stable mechanism is group strategy proof for doctors under these same conditions that is no group of doctors can make each of its members strictly better off by jointly misreporting their preferences we derive as a corollary of this result that no individually rational allocation is preferred by all the doctors to the doctor optimal stable allocation

emergence and complexity in austrian economics abstract emergence is often argued to be a deep property of complex systems with such systems exhibiting wholes that are in some way greater than the sum of their parts these ideas have played an important part in discussions of spontaneous order within austrian economics particularly by hayek drawing on arguments dating from mill and menger although with other traditions such as that of bohm bawerk not relying on such ideas philosophical discussions of these terms are considered that raise questions about the relationship between the emergent whole and the lower level parts that comprise it a major issue is the role of these ideas and processes within evolution with hayek in particular moving strongly towards identifying their linkage something advocated by many non austrian economists and non economists as well

reserve design unintended consequences and the demise of boston s walk zones we show that in the presence of admissions reserves the effect of the precedence order i e the order in which different types of seats are filled is comparable to the effect of adjusting reser

polices for increasing energy efficiency thirty years of experience in oecd countries energy efficiency improvement was an important phenomenon in the global energy balance over the past 30 years without energy efficiency improvements the oecd nations would have used approximately 49 more energy than was actually consumed as of 1998 this paper first reviews energy intensity trends for the major oecd nations since 1973 considering how much of the overall reduction in e gdp was due to energy efficiency improvement and how much was due to structural change the bulk of the paper examines the energy efficiency policies and programs adopted in japan united states and western europe commenting on their effectiveness and energy savings impacts where possible the paper also reviews the energy efficiency policies and programs adopted in california this experience shows that well designed policies can result in substantial energy savings as demonstrated in the united states where nine specific policies and programs reduced primary energy use in 2002 by approximately 11 substantial energy savings also occurred in japan some european countries and in the electricity sector in california

why do popular mechanisms lack efficiency in random environments we consider the problem of randomly assigning n indivisible objects to n agents recent research introduced a promising mechanism the probabilistic serial that has superior e ciency properties than the most common real life mechanism random priority on the other hand mechanisms based on gale s celebrated top trading cycles method have long dominated the indivisible goods literature with the exception of the present context thanks to their outstanding e ciency features we present an equivalence

designing random allocation mechanisms theory and applications randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation we generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi unit allocations and various real world constraints such as group specific quotas controlled choice in school choice and house allocation and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation we develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments and that incorporate certain non additive substitutable preferences we also develop a utility guarantee technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization this can be applied to multi unit assignment problems and certain two sided matching problems jel c78 d82

do energy efficiency investments deliver evidence from the weatherization assistance program a growing number of policies and programs aim to increase investment in energy efficiency because conventional wisdom suggests that people fail to take up these investments even though they have positive private returns and generate environmental benefits many explanations for this energy efficiency gap have been put forward but there has been surprisingly little field testing of whether the conventional wisdom is correct this article reports on the results of an experimental evaluation of the nation s largest residential energy efficiency program the weatherization assistance program conducted on a sample of approximately 30 000 households in michigan the findings suggest that the upfront investment costs are about twice the actual energy savings furthermore the model projected savings are more than three times the actual savings although this might be attributed to the rebound effect when demand for energy end uses increases as a result of greater efficiency the article fails to find evidence of significantly higher indoor temperatures at weatherized homes even when accounting for the broader societal benefits derived from emissions reductions the costs still substantially outweigh the benefits the average rate of return is approximately 7 8 annually

energy efficiency and household behavior the rebound effect in the residential sector over the years various efficiency policies have been designed and implemented to reduce residential energy consumption however it is very common that the policy expectations that are based upon engineering calculations do not come true the widely accepted explanation for the gap between expectation and the realization is the change of household behavior as the energy efficiency gains change the perceived cost of energy services and thereby generate shifts in consumption patterns the rebound effect the real controversy about the rebound effect lies in the identification of its magnitude in this paper we estimate the rebound effect in residential energy consumption by comparing the actual gas consumption levels with the ex ante predictions within a sample of well over 600 000 dutch dwellings and households we find a significant deviation between the engineering predictions and the households actual energy consumption a difference which varies by ownership wealth income and the actual gas use intensity our results show a rebound effect of 26 7 percent among home owners and 41 3 percent among tenants moreover we find that these effects are greatest among the lower income wealth groups and among households that tend to use more gas than average

are the non monetary costs of energy efficiency investments large understanding low take up of a free energy efficiency program this paper finds striking evidence that individuals and households bypass opportunities to improve energy efficiency that require zero out of pocket expenditures and are widely believed to be privately beneficial we report results from a large scale randomized controlled trial that significantly reduced barriers to participation in the federal weatherization assistance program wap this program the largest residential energy efficiency program in the country aims to reduce the energy burden of low income americans by installing energy efficiency measures in their homes since the program s inception in 1976 more than 7 million households have received weatherization assistance related work fowlie greenstone and wolfram 2015 finds that participation in this program significantly reduces energy consumption and associated energy expenditures among participating households 1 these sizeable

willingness to pay for energy saving measures in residential buildings this paper uses a choice experiment to evaluate the consumers willingness to pay for energy saving measures in switzerland s residential buildings these measures include air renewal ventilation systems and insulation of windows and facades two groups of respondents consisting respectively of 163 apartment tenants and 142 house owners were asked to choose between their housing status quo and each one of the several hypothetical situations with different attributes and prices the estimation method is based on a fixed effects logit model the results suggest that the benefits of the energy saving attributes are significantly valued by the consumers these benefits include both individual energy savings and environmental benefits as well as comfort benefits namely thermal comfort air quality and noise protection

some further properties of the cumulative offer process we investigate extension resource monotonicity and respecting improvements properties of the cumulative offer process cop extension monotonicity says that no doctor is to be better off whenever others start preferring more contracts to being unmatched resource monotonicity on the other hand requires that no doctor becomes worse off whenever hospitals start hiring more doctors the cop becomes extension and resource monotonic whenever contracts are unilateral substitutes us satisfying an irrelevance of rejected contracts condition irc this result implies that the cop is population monotonic under us and the irc we then turn to the respecting improvements property which states that no doctor should be harmed if some of his contracts become more popular with an additional law of aggregate demand condition we show that the cop respects improvements

optimal allocation without money an engineering approach we study the allocation of heterogeneous services to agents with incomplete information and without monetary transfers agents have private multidimensional utilities over services drawn from commonly known priors the social planner s goal is to maximize a potentially complex public objective for tractability we take an engineering approach in which we solve a large market approximation and convert the solution into a feasible finite market mechanism that still yields good results we apply this framework to real data from boston to design a mechanism that assigns students to public schools in order to maximize a linear combination of utilitarian and max min welfare subject to capacity and transportation constraints we show how to optimally solve a large market formulation with more than 868 types of students and 77 schools and we translate the solution into a finite market mechanism that significantly outperforms the baseline plan chosen by the city in terms of efficiency equity and predic

matching with contracts we develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates as special cases the college admissions problem the kelso crawford labor market matching model and ascending package auctions we introduce a new law of aggregate demand for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show that when workers are substitutes this law is satisfied by profit maximizing firms when workers are substitutes and the law is satisfied truthful reporting is a dominant strategy for workers in a worker offering auction matching algorithm we also parameterize a large class of preferences satisfying the two conditions

assigning resources to budget constrained agents this article studies different methods of assigning a good to budget constrained agents schemes that assign the good randomly and allow resale may outperform the competitive market in terms of utilitarian efficiency the socially optimal mechanism involves random assignment at a discount an in kind subsidy and a cash incentive to discourage low valuation individuals from claiming the good copyright oxford university press

the combinatorial assignment problem approximate competitive equilibrium from equal incomes this paper proposes a new mechanism for combinatorial assignment for example assigning schedules of courses to students based on an approximation to competitive equilibrium from equal incomes ceei in which incomes are unequal but arbitrarily close together the main technical result is an existence theorem for approximate ceei the mechanism is approximately efficient satisfies two new criteria of outcome fairness and is strategyproof in large markets its performance is explored on real data and it is compared to alternatives from theory and practice all other known mechanisms are either unfair ex post or manipulable even in large markets and most are both manipulable and unfair

who rebounds most estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for different uk socioeconomic groups this study estimates the combined direct and indirect rebound effects from various types of energy efficiency improvement and behavioural change by uk households and explores how these effects vary with total expenditure the methodology is based upon estimates of the expenditure elasticity and ghg intensity of 16 categories of goods and services and allows for the capital cost and embodied emissions of the energy efficiency measures themselves the study finds that rebound effects in ghg terms are modest 0 32 for measures affecting domestic energy use larger 25 65 for measures affecting vehicle fuel use and very large 66 106 for measures that reduce food waste furthermore measures undertaken by low income households are associated with the largest rebound effects with direct emissions forming a larger proportion of the total rebound effect for those households measures that are subsidised or affect highly taxed energy commodities may be less effective in reducing aggregate emissions these findings highlight the importance of allowing for rebound effects within policy appraisals as well as reinforcing the case for economy wide carbon pricing

impact of energy policy instruments on the estimated level of underlying energy efficiency in the eu residential sector the promotion of energy efficiency is seen as one of the top priorities of eu energy policy ec 2010 in order to design and implement effective energy policy instruments it is necessary to have information on energy demand price and income elasticities in addition to sound indicators of energy efficiency this research combines the approaches taken in energy demand modelling and frontier analysis in order to econometrically estimate the level of energy efficiency for the residential sector in the eu 27 member states for the period 1996 to 2009 the estimates for the energy efficiency confirm that the eu residential sector indeed holds a relatively high potential for energy savings from reduced inefficiency therefore despite the common objective to decrease wasteful energy consumption considerable variation in energy efficiency between the eu member states is established furthermore an attempt is made to evaluate the impact of energy efficiency measures undertaken in the eu residential sector by introducing an additional set of variables into the model and the results suggest that financial incentives and energy performance standards play an important role in promoting energy efficiency improvements whereas informative measures do not have a significant impact

the greek financial crisis growing imbalances and sovereign spreads abstract we discuss the origins of the greek financial crisis as manifested in the growing fiscal and current account deficits since euro area entry in 2001 we then extend a model typically used to explain risk premia to assess the extent to which credit ratings captured these premia next we estimate a cointegrating relationship between spreads and their long term fundamental determinants and compare the spreads predicted by this estimated relationship with actual spreads we find that spreads were significantly below what would be predicted by fundamentals from end 2004 up to the middle of 2005 by contrast since may 2010 actual spreads have exceeded predicted spreads by some 400 basis points

residential energy efficient technology adoption energy conservation knowledge and attitudes an analysis of european countries abstract relationships between measures of household energy use behavior and household characteristics are estimated using a unique dataset of approximately 5000 households in 10 eu countries and norway family age composition patterns are found to have a distinct impact on household energy use behavior households with young children are more likely to adopt energy efficient technologies and energy conservation practices and place primary importance on energy savings for environmental reasons by contrast households with a high share of elderly members place more importance on financial savings and have lower levels of technology adoption energy conservation practice use and knowledge about household energy use education levels also matter with higher levels associated with energy efficient technology adoption and energy conservation practice use similarly university education increases the stated importance of energy savings for greenhouse gas reductions and decreases the stated importance for financial reasons education impacts also vary greatly across survey countries and there is some evidence of an eastern western european divide with respect to attitudes towards energy savings these cross country differences highlight the need to balance a common eu energy efficiency policy framework with flexibility for country specific policies to address unique constraints to energy efficient technology and conservation practice adoption

incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism abstract 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

school choice impossibilities for affirmative action abstract 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

recent developments in matching with constraints in an earlier work kamada and kojima 2015 we introduced matching with constraints a two sided matching problem in which the market is subject to feasibility constraints that paper proposed and analyzed a possible solution to this problem and discussed various real market applications of our results the present paper reorganizes some of the findings from our more recent effort based on kamada and kojima 2016a b

the anatomy of emergence with a focus upon capital formation abstract emergence is a unifying theme of both evolutionary economics and complex systems theory in spite of this centrality emergence in economics has not been subject to an extensive critical analysis this paper remedies this deficit we identify several conditions that economic patterns i e rule systems structures must satisfy to qualify as emergent 1 material realization emergent patterns are realized in physical structures and processes 2 coherence pattern is not a mere aggregate but a systemic whole 3 non distributivity pattern possesses global properties absent from its parts 4 structure dependence systemic properties depend upon connective structure these four core features are common to all forms of emergence in economics evolutionary economic systems also exhibit extra strength versions of emergence which require that patterns possess one or more additional features 5 genuine novelty 6 unpredictability in principle and 7 irreducibility we introduce three basic forms of emergence that occur in economic systems minimal diachronic and synchronic emergence and apply these ideas to capital formation at all levels of economic order the economy wide capital structure exhibits strongly emergent properties both diachronic and synchronic that depend on its structural and functional organization it is not a mere aggregate of capital goods within the realm of capital phenomena we also compare the distinguishing characteristics of emergent and spontaneous self organizing orders we provide a case study of the iphone as an emergent capital pattern to illustrate conditions 1 7 above and the different types of emergence

on responsiveness of top trading cycles mechanism to priority based affirmative action abstract in school choice priority based affirmative action favors minority students by means of promoting their priority ranking at schools this paper investigates the responsiveness of the top trading cycles mechanism to priority based affirmative action when schools priority structure satisfies a certain acyclicity condition when schools priority under the problem without affirmative action satisfies virtual homogeneity condition a weak responsiveness result is obtained

how to control controlled school choice we characterize choice rules for schools that regard students as substitutes while expressing preferences for a diverse student body the stable or fair assignment of students to schools requires the latter to regard the former as substitutes such a requirement is in conflict with the reality of schools preferences for diversity we show that the conflict can be useful in the sense that certain unique rules emerge from imposing both considerations we also provide welfare comparisons for students when different choice rules are employed

responsive affirmative action in school choice a comparison study abstract this note provides a comparison study on responsiveness of two extensively used mechanisms to affirmative action in school choice for priority based affirmative action we show that if a stronger priority based affirmative action favors minority students by giving full priority to the minority then such a policy makes each minority student weakly better off under the student proposing deferred acceptance henceforth da mechanism however the top trading cycles henceforth ttc mechanism does not satisfy this property under the da mechanism if the original problem gives full priority to the minority then the assignment of minority students does not change when the problem moves to a higher level of affirmative action on the contrary this property does not hold under the ttc mechanism

stable marriages and search frictions stable matchings are the primary solution concept for two sided matching markets with nontransferable utility we investigate the strategic foundations of stability in a decentralized matching market towards this end we embed the standard marriage markets in a search model with random meetings we study the limit of steady state equilibria as exogenous frictions vanish the main result is that convergence of equilibrium matchings to stable matchings is guaranteed if and only if there is a unique stable matching in the underlying marriage market whenever there are multiple stable matchings sequences of equilibrium matchings converging to unstable inefficient matchings can be constructed thus vanishing frictions do not guarantee the stability and efficiency of decentralized marriage markets