Research

1. Characterization of Top Trading Cycles with single-dipped preferences [Publisher], with Jun Zhang, Economics Letters, 2024

2. Cognitive ability in matching with strategic uncertainty: An experimental study. [Publisher], with Lan Yao, China Economic Review,2024

1. Reforming China’s Two-Stage College Admission: An experimental study, with Lan Yao and Jun Zhang, 2024. [SSRN]

   Abstract: The Chinese college admission system uses a two-stage matching process: students are first assigned to colleges, then to majors. Students who fail to secure a major in the second stage cannot revert to the first stage to reapply to other colleges within the same tier, creating the incentives for students to accept a ``major transfer’’ option in their preference tables and leading to suboptimal assignments. This paper examines the shortcomings of the two-stage process and explores an alternative that merges the two stages into one. Our analysis is supported by laboratory experiments and informs the latest reform in the system.

2. Verifiable affirmative action in school admissions, with Jun Zhang, 2025, [arxiv]

   Abstract: When implementing affirmative action through reserve systems, to maintain social trust and demonstrate the absence of corruption, countries such as Brazil, China, and India aim for verifiable allocations of reserve quotas, allowing students to confirm their assignments using private information and publicly disclosed data such as school admission cutoffs. Motivated by this, we study verifiable mechanisms in the controlled school choice model. We first show that sequential mechanisms, which allocate reserved and open seats in separate stages, offer intuitive verifiability but suffer from strategic complexity and inefficiency. We then formalize verifiability for simultaneous mechanisms, which allocate all seats in a single stage. We prove that a mechanism is individually rational, strategy-proof, and verifiable if and only if it is a deferred acceptance mechanism using one of two choice rules we characterize. We recommend a specific rule and mechanism and discuss their practical relevance to China’s high school admissions.

3. Local unanimity in Shapley-Scarf housing, markets, ​with Jun Zhang, 2025.