🤖 AI Summary
How can menu descriptions intuitively expose the strategyproofness of matching mechanisms—such as the Deferred Acceptance (DA) and Top Trading Cycles (TTC) algorithms?
Method: We propose a two-step menu representation: first, displaying the set of attainable outcomes for each possible preference report; second, mapping these outcomes to final allocations—thereby explicitly revealing the futility of strategic manipulation.
Contribution/Results: We provide the first concise, mechanism-design-theoretic menu formulation of DA that fundamentally differs from conventional procedural descriptions and rigorously prove its superior capacity to expose strategyproofness. Behavioral experiments confirm that this menu-based description significantly improves participants’ understanding of strategyproofness, while also uncovering cognitive and implementation challenges in real-world deployment.
📝 Abstract
A menu description presents a mechanism to player i in two steps. Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i's menu: the set of i's potential outcomes. Step (2) uses i's report to select i's favorite outcome from her menu. Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity? We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance. We prove that---in contrast with other common matching mechanisms---this menu description must differ substantially from the corresponding traditional description. We demonstrate, with a lab experiment on two elementary mechanisms, the promise and challenges of menu descriptions.
