Scholars@Duke
Atila Abdulkadiroglu

Atila Abdulkadiroglu

Garonzik Family Distinguished Professor
Economics
atila.abdulkadiroglu@duke.edu
Duke Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708-0097
219B Social Sciences, Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

School Assignment by Match Quality

Journal Article · February 2021 Cite

Efficiency, Justified Envy, and Incentives in Priority-Based Matching

Journal Article American Economic Review: Insights · December 1, 2020 Top trading cycles (TTC) is Pareto efficient and strategy-proof in priority-based matching, but so are other mechanisms including serial dictatorship. We show that TTC minimizes justified envy among all Pareto-efficient and strategy-proof mechanis ... Full text Cite

Efficient and Envy Minimal Matching

Journal Article · June 1, 2020 Cite

Do parents value school effectiveness?†

Journal Article American Economic Review · May 1, 2020 School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents’choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We stud ... Full text Cite

Free to choose: Can school choice reduce student achievement

Journal Article American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · January 1, 2018 A central argument for school choice is that parents can choose schools wisely. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations have almost always reported positive or zero achievement effects. This paper reports on a striking counterexamp ... Full text Cite

Free to Choose: Can School Choice Reduce Student Achievement?

Journal Article American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · January 2018 A central argument for school choice is that parents can choose schools wisely. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations have almost always reported positive or zero achievement effects. This paper reports on a striking counterexamp ... Cite

The welfare effects of coordinated assignment: Evidence from the New York city high school match

Journal Article American Economic Review · December 1, 2017 Coordinated single-offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform. We show that uncoordinated offers in NYC's school assignment mechanism generated mismatches. One-third of applicants were unassigned after the main round and later administr ... Full text Cite

Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation

Journal Article Econometrica · September 1, 2017 A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversub ... Full text Cite

Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation

Journal Article Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper · March 6, 2017 Cite

Charters without lotteries: Testing takeovers in New Orleans and Boston

Journal Article American Economic Review · July 1, 2016 Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar scho ... Full text Cite

Letter from the editors

Journal Article Review of Economic Design · March 1, 2015 Full text Cite

Trust, Reciprocity, and Favors in Cooperative Relationships

Journal Article American Economic Journal: Microeconomics · May 2013 We study trust, reciprocity, and favors in a repeated trust game with private information. In our main analysis, players are willing to exhibit trust and thereby facilitate cooperative gains only if such behavior is regarded as a favor that must be recipro ... Cite

Matching Markets: Theory and Practice

Conference ADVANCES IN ECONOMICS AND ECONOMETRICS, VOL I: ECONOMIC THEORY · January 1, 2013 Link to item Cite

Accountability and flexibility in public schools: Evidence from boston's charters and pilots

Journal Article Quarterly Journal of Economics · May 1, 2011 We use student assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of charter school attendance onstudent achievement in Boston. We also evaluate a related alternative, Boston's pilot schools. Pilot schools have some of the independence of charter schools but are ... Full text Cite

Matching markets: Theory and practice

Journal Article · January 1, 2011 It has been almost a half-century since David Gale and Lloyd Shapley (1962) published their pathbreaking paper, “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” in American Mathematical Monthly. It is difficult to know whether Gale and Shapley expected ... Full text Cite

Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match

Journal Article American Economic Review · December 1, 2009 The design of the New York City (NYC) high school match involved trade-offs among efficiency, stability, and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences-ties-in school preferences. Simulations with field d ... Full text Open Access Cite

Expanding "Choice" in School Choice

Other · 2008 Truthful revelation of preferences has emerged as a desideratum in the design of school choice programs. Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance mechanism is strategy-proof for students but limits their ability to communicate their preference intensities. This ... Cite

College admissions with affirmative action

Journal Article International Journal of Game Theory · November 1, 2005 This paper first shows that when colleges' preferences are substitutable there does not exist any stable matching mechanism that makes truthful revelation of preferences a dominant strategy for every student. The paper introduces student types and captures ... Full text Cite

The New York City high school match

Journal Article American Economic Review · May 1, 2005 Full text Cite

The Boston public school match

Journal Article American Economic Review · May 1, 2005 Full text Cite

Room assignment-rent division: A market approach

Journal Article Social Choice and Welfare · June 1, 2004 A group of friends consider renting a house but they shall first agree on how to allocate its rooms and share the rent. We propose an auction mechanism for room assignment-rent division problems which mimics the market mechanism. Our auction mechanism is e ... Full text Cite

Ordinal efficiency and dominated sets of assignments

Journal Article Journal of Economic Theory · September 1, 2003 Using lotteries is a common tool for allocating indivisible goods. Since obtaining preferences over lotteries is often difficult, real-life mechanisms usually rely on ordinal preferences over deterministic outcomes. Bogomolnaia and Moulin (J. Econom. Theor ... Full text Open Access Cite

School choice: A mechanism design approach

Journal Article American Economic Review · June 1, 2003 A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appea ... Full text Open Access Cite

Unemployment Insurance and the Role of Self-Insurance

Journal Article Review of Economic Dynamics · July 2002 This paper employs a dynamic general equilibrium model to design and evaluate long-term unemployment insurance plans (plans that depend on workers' unemployment history) in economies with and without hidden savings. We show that optimal benefit schemes ... Cite

Unemployment insurance and the role of self-insurance

Journal Article Review of Economic Dynamics · January 1, 2002 This paper employs a dynamic general equilibrium model to design and evaluate long-term unemployment insurance plans (plans that depend on workers' unemployment history) in economies with and without hidden savings. We show that optimal benefit schemes and ... Full text Cite

Mechanism design with tacit collusion

Other · 2002 In the mechanism design literature, collusion is often modelled as agents signing side contracts. This modelling approach is in turn implicitly justified by some unspecified repeated-interaction story. In this paper, we first second-guess what kind of repe ... Cite

House Allocation with Existing Tenants

Journal Article Journal of Economic Theory · October 1, 1999 In many real-life applications of house allocation problems, whenever an existing tenant wants to move, he needs to give up his current house before getting another one. This practice discourages existing tenants from such attempts and results in loss of p ... Full text Cite

Changing the Boston School Choice Mechanism

Other In July 2005 the Boston School Committee voted to replace the existing Boston school choice mechanism with a deferred acceptance mechanism that simplifies the strategic choices facing parents. This paper presents the empirical case against the previous Bo ... Cite