An Empirical Comparison of One-Sided Matching Mechanisms

For one-sided matching problems, two widely studied mechanisms are the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) and the Probabilistic Serial Rule (PS). Both mechanisms require only that agents specify ordinal preferences and have a number of desirable economic and computational properties. However, the induced outcomes of the mechanisms are often incomparable and thus there are challenges when it comes to deciding which mechanism to adopt in practice. In this paper, working in the space of general ordinal preferences, we provide empirical results on the (in)comparability of RSD and PS and analyze their respective economic properties. We then instantiate utility functions for agents, consistent with the ordinal preferences, with the goal of gaining insights on the manipulability, efficiency, and envyfreeness of the mechanisms under different risk attitude models.