Matching with waiting times: The German entry-level labor market for lawyers

Abstract

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used "Berlin" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not respect improvements. We introduce a mechanism based on the matching with contracts literature, using waiting time as the contractual term. The resulting mechanism is strategy-proof, weakly Pareto efficient, eliminates justified envy and respects improvements. We extend our proposed mechanism to allow for a more flexible allocation of positions over time.

Multiperiod Matching

“…All of the above 7 Corbae et al (2003), Kurino (2009), andDoval (2017) propose stability definitions that assume agents coordinate on a contingent plan for the economy conditional on each counterfactual history. 8 For example, see Dimakopoulos and Heller (2014). 9 See Example A.1 in the online Appendix.…”

An Invitation to Market Design

“…School choice systems throughout the United States and European Union use variants of deferred acceptance mechanism to match students to schools; in school choice contexts, requiring stability corresponds to eliminating justified envy among participants. 11 Similar systems are used to assign lawyers (Dimakopoulos and Heller, 2017) and teachers (Hatfield and Kominers, 2015) to traineeships in Germany, to match psychology students to Masters programs in Israel (Hassidim et al, 2017), and to assign cadets to branches of military service (Sönmez, 2013;Sönmez and Switzer, 2013).…”

Who Cares More? Allocation with Diverse Preference Intensities

“…Leshno (2019) considers the implications of a desire to speed up assignments on the design of a dynamic allocation procedure. Dimakopoulos and Heller (2019) show that using wait time as a contractual term can be beneficial in the German market for entrylevel lawyers. 1 The link between exponential discounting and risk attitudes over lotteries involving timed services has been illustrated by Dejarnette, Dillenberger, Gottlieb, and Ortoleva (2020) and is utilized in some of our examples.…”