Deferred Acceptance is Minimally Manipulable
34 Pages Posted: 18 Apr 2016 Last revised: 9 Apr 2017
Date Written: April 7, 2017
Abstract
This paper shows that the deferred acceptance mechanism (DA) cannot be improved upon in terms of manipulability in the sense of either Pathak and Sönmez (2013) or Arribillaga and Massó (2015) without compromising with stability. A conflict between manipulability and fairness is also identified. It is shown that miniworst stable mechanisms that make the set of individuals who match with their worst achievable mate minimal are maximally manipulable among the stable mechanisms. Miniworst mechanisms are also more manipulable than DA in the sense of Arribillaga and Massó (2015). A similar conflict between fairness and manipulability is identified in the case of the median stable mechanism (Teo and Sethuraman, 1998).
Keywords: matching, deferred acceptance, manipulability, marriage problem
JEL Classification: C78, D47, D82
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation