Report-Dependent Utility and Strategy-Proofness

Despite the truthful dominant strategy, participants in strategy-proof mechanisms submit manipulated preferences. In our model, participants dislike rejections and enjoy the confirmation from getting what they declare desirable. Formally, the payoff from a match decreases in its position in the submitted ranking such that a strategic trade-off between preference intensity and match probability arises. This trade-off can trigger the commonly observed self-selection strategies. We show that misrepresentations can persist for arbitrarily small report-dependent components. However, honesty is guaranteed to be optimal if and only if there is no conflict between the quality and feasibility of a match. We substantiate the theory with already existing evidence and provide novel testable predictions.

This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This work was supported by UniCredit and Universities Foundation [Modigliani Research Grant 2020/2021] and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant 280092119].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4504.