Respecting Improvement in Markets with Indivisible Goods

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Ehlers, Lars
• 署名单位: Universite de Montreal; Universite de Montreal
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2025.00052
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: Indivisible goods; respecting improvement; top trading cycles; Indifferences; tiebreaking

摘要

A generalized matching problem consists of a set of agents, a set of objects, the agents' endowments, a set of feasible matchings, and the agents' preferences over feasible matchings. Respect for improvement means that when the ranking of an agent's endowment improves in some other agent's preference (while keeping other preferences unchanged), then this agent weakly benefits from it. Our main result shows across matching applications that on the strict domain, individual rationality, strategy-proofness, and non-bossiness imply respecting improvement. As a consequence for housing markets, we obtain that top trading with fixed tiebreaking and top trading with random tiebreaking satisfy respecting improvement on the weak domain. We further show that several application-based extensions of the top-trading-cycles mechanism (such as for kidney exchange and school choice) satisfy (a weak version of) respecting improvement.