Transparent matching mechanisms
2026-02-02
In the standard one‐to‐one agent‐object matching model, I consider a central matching authority that publicly announces a strategy‐proof mechanism and then initiates a matching. Following Akbarpour and Li (2020), the authority's commitment to the announced mechanism is limited to mechanisms rendering participants' observations indistinguishable from it. I call an announced mechanism transparent if any deviation from it would be detected. The main findings identify trade‐offs regarding transparency and other desirable properties: under stability or efficiency, strategy‐proof mechanisms are transparent if and only if they are dictatorial. At the same time, the agent‐proposing Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism is equivalent to committing to stability, while efficient mechanisms often fail to commit to efficiency. This transparency trade‐off between stability and efficiency persists when strategy‐proofness is guaranteed.