Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Cadet-branch matching

Cadet-branch matching Cadet-Branch Matching ¨ TAYFUN SONMEZ Boston College Prior to 2006, the United States Military Academy (USMA) matched cadets to military specialties (branches) using a single category ranking system to determine priority. Since 2006, priority for the last 25 percent of the slots at each branch has been given to cadets who sign a branch-of-choice contract committing to serve in the Army for three additional years. Building on theoretical work of Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) and Hatfield and Kojima (2010), S¨nmez and Switzer (2013) show o that the resulting new matching problem not only has practical importance but also it fills a gap in the market design literature. Even though the new branch priorities designed by the Department of the Army fail a substitutes condition, the cumulative offer algorithm of Hatfield-Milgrom gives a cadet-optimal stable outcome in this environment. The resulting mechanism restores a number of important properties to the current USMA mechanism including stability, strategy-proofness and fairness which not only increase cadet welfare consistent with OCSP goals but also provides the Army with very accurate estimates of the effect of a change in the parameters of the mechanism on number of man-year gains by the branch-of-choice incentive program. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGecom Exchanges Association for Computing Machinery

Cadet-branch matching

Sönmez, Tayfun
ACM SIGecom Exchanges , Volume 13 (1) – Nov 25, 2014
Download PDF
8 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/cadet-branch-matching-VyCqV70FlB
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
1551-9031
DOI
10.1145/2692375.2692379
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Cadet-Branch Matching ¨ TAYFUN SONMEZ Boston College Prior to 2006, the United States Military Academy (USMA) matched cadets to military specialties (branches) using a single category ranking system to determine priority. Since 2006, priority for the last 25 percent of the slots at each branch has been given to cadets who sign a branch-of-choice contract committing to serve in the Army for three additional years. Building on theoretical work of Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) and Hatfield and Kojima (2010), S¨nmez and Switzer (2013) show o that the resulting new matching problem not only has practical importance but also it fills a gap in the market design literature. Even though the new branch priorities designed by the Department of the Army fail a substitutes condition, the cumulative offer algorithm of Hatfield-Milgrom gives a cadet-optimal stable outcome in this environment. The resulting mechanism restores a number of important properties to the current USMA mechanism including stability, strategy-proofness and fairness which not only increase cadet welfare consistent with OCSP goals but also provides the Army with very accurate estimates of the effect of a change in the parameters of the mechanism on number of man-year gains by the branch-of-choice incentive program.

Journal

ACM SIGecom Exchanges – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Nov 25, 2014

There are no references for this article.