Backward unraveling over time: The evolution of strategic behavior in the entry level British medical labor markets

Market Culture: How Rules Governing Exploding Offers Affect Market Performance

“…Once some applicants are ready to accept early offers, they impose a negative externality on high quality firms, making the whole market move early. We have seen in other environments that to successfully halt unraveling, a major factor is that applicants must be willing to reject early offers (Kagel and Roth 2000;McKinney, Niederle, and Roth 2005;Ünver 2001;Haruvy, Roth, and Ünver 2006). When offers are open, or when applicants can renege on their acceptances, then the market does not have to depend on applicants' willingness to reject early offers to have most of its transactions happen efficiently late.…”

The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics

“…This further clarifies the manner in which the mechanisms differ in the rewards they give to different strategies. And the comparisons with a prior computational study of these markets(Unver (2000a)) are illuminating in that they suggest that some kinds of strategic behavior come more naturally than others to human subjects; that…”

Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation

“…Firms and applicants have one of two possible qualities, high (h) or low (`). A matching is a mapping that (i) maps each agent to a partner on the other side of the market or leaves her unmatched, and (ii) for any firm f and applicant a, maps f to a if and have unraveling (under conditions of fixed supply and demand) determined by the competition for workers as determined by how correlated firms' preferences ( [29]), or by how well connected firms are to early information about workers' qualities ( [30]), or by the establishment of certain kinds of centralized matching mechanisms ( [2,12,31]), or by strategic unraveling and uncertainty imposed by the negative externality caused by an early offer of an agent ( [32]). In prior experimental studies, [13,21,33] look at unraveling as a function of what kinds of centralized market clearing mechanism are available at the time when matching may be done efficiently.…”

“…2 See e.g., [3] on how the market for gastroenterology fellows fragmented when it unraveled, or [4] on how college football bowls lost television viewership in years when teams and bowls were matched too early. 3 See e.g., [5][6][7][8] on the market for gastroenterologists, [9] for the markets with exploding offers such as the law-clerk matching market, [10] on the market for new American medical graduates, [11][12][13] on markets for new British doctors, and [4] on college football bowl selections. 4 Titled "A Cure for Application Fever: Schools Hook More Students with Early Acceptance Offers."…”