When Manipulations Are Harm[less]ful?

Abstract

We say that a mechanism is harmless if no student can ever misreport his preferences so that he does not hurt but someone else. We consider a large class of rules which includes the Boston, the agent-proposing deferred acceptance, and the school-proposing deferred acceptance mechanisms (sDA). In this large class, the sDA happens to the unique harmless mechanism. We next provide two axiomatic characterizations of the sDA. First, the sDA is the unique stable, non-bossy, and independent of irrelevant student mechanism. The last axiom is a weak variant of consistency. As harmlessness implies non-bossiness, the sDA is also the unique stable, harmless, and independent of irrelevant student mechanism.