Adaptive Priority Mechanisms

Abstract

How should authorities that care about match quality and diversity allocate resources when they are uncertain about the market? We introduce adaptive priority mechanisms (APM) that prioritize agents based on both their scores and characteristics. We derive an APM that is optimal and show that the ubiquitous priority and quota mechanisms are optimal if and only if the authority is risk-neutral or extremely risk-averse over diversity, respectively. With many authorities, each authority using the optimal APM is dominant and implements the unique stable matching. Using Chicago Public Schools data, we find that the gains from adopting APM may be considerable.