LEARNING AND MECHANISM DESIGN: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF SCHOOL MATCHING MECHANISMS WITH INTERGENERATIONAL ADVICE

While the mechanisms that economists design are typically static, one-shot games, in the real world, mechanisms are used repeatedly by generations of agents who engage in them for a short period of time and then pass on advice to their successors. Hence, behaviour evolves via social learning and may diverge dramatically from that envisioned by the designer. We demonstrate that this is true of school matching mechanisms-even those for which truth-telling is a dominant strategy. Our results indicate that experience with an incentive-compatible mechanism may not foster truthful revelation if that experience is achieved via social learning.

虽然经济学家所设计的机制通常是静态的一次性博弈，但在现实世界中，机制是由一代代的参与者反复使用的，他们参与的时间较短，然后将经验传授给他们的继任者。因此，行为通过社会学习而演变，可能与设计者所设想的大相径庭。我们证明，学校匹配机制就是如此——即使是那些讲真话为占优策略的机制。我们的研究结果表明，如果是通过社会学习获得经验，那么具有激励相容机制的经验可能不会促进如实披露。