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Organizing Time Exchanges: Lessons from Matching Markets

The Erasmus Program in Europe and the Tuition Fee Exchange in the US are just two examples of time exchange markets. Despite existing for decades, these markets experience a whole set of issues such as coordination problems and imbalanced outcomes. In this recently published paper, Professor Tommy Andersson, Affiliated Professor at Department of Economics, and coauthors construct a non-manipulative mechanism, that maximizes exchanges among participating agents.

Organizing Time Exchanges: Lessons from Matching Markets

By Tommy Andersson, Ágnes Cseh, Lars Ehlers, and Albin Erlanson

Abstract

This paper considers time exchanges via a common platform (e.g., markets for exchanging time units, positions at education institutions, and tuition waivers). There are several problems associated with such markets, e.g., imbalanced outcomes, coordination problems, and inefficiencies. We model time exchanges as matching markets and construct a non-manipulable mechanism that selects an individually rational and balanced allocation that maximizes exchanges among the participating agents (and those allocations are efficient). This mechanism works on a preference domain whereby agents classify the goods provided by other participating agents as either unacceptable or acceptable, and for goods classified as acceptable, agents have specific upper quotas representing their maximum needs.

Dept. of Economics Education Economics Article Journal Paper Publication