A Note on Ex-Ante Stable Lotteries
10 Pages Posted: 29 Nov 2017 Last revised: 30 Nov 2017
Date Written: November 25, 2017
Abstract
We study ex-ante priority respecting (ex-ante stable) lotteries in the context of object allocation under thick priorities. We show that ex-ante stability as a fairness condition is very demanding: Only few agent-object pairs have a positive probability of being matched in an ex-ante stable assignment. We interpret our result as an impossibility result. With ex-ante stability one cannot go much beyond randomly breaking ties and implementing a (deterministically) stable matching with respect to the broken ties.
Keywords: Matching; School Choice; Lotteries; Ex-Ante Stability
JEL Classification: C78, D47
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation