Research

Centralised matching markets rely on candidate-proposing deferred acceptance to guarantee strategy-proofness and candidate-optimal outcomes. This paper studies whether pre-match messaging by firms undermines these guarantees. We build a model incorporating ego-utility, reciprocity, rejection aversion, and rank-dependent preferences, and test its predictions in a laboratory experiment with committed, uncommitted, and random-message treatments. Firms direct messages strategically, candidates respond by mis-reporting their rank-order lists in favour of the messaging firm, and market outcomes shift toward firm-optimal stable matchings. Pre-match communication is an accessible, low-risk manipulation that exploits behavioural biases strategy-proof mechanisms were not designed to withstand.

Selection mechanisms that rank candidates on exams, honours, or research output sort only on what they observe, yet job competence often has dimensions these signals miss. I study this trade-off in a matching tournament: high- and low-ability candidates split a fixed effort budget between observable signalling and unobserved soft-skill investment, and are hired assortatively by high- and low-quality firms on a noisy signal of that effort. A precise exam sorts more accurately but invites over-investment in signalling; a lottery removes that over-investment but sorts randomly, and a coarse exam approaches the lottery as noise increases. I show a precise exam raises welfare when the ability gap between candidates is large relative to the quality difference between firms; when the reverse holds, increasing exam noise raises welfare, and a lottery achieves the highest welfare in the limit. I test these predictions in a laboratory experiment that varies exam noise and the ability gap, and ask whether observed effort and welfare track the theoretical reversal or deviate from it, and if so, why.

In design stage

Students from low-socioeconomic (low-SES) backgrounds often face substantial information frictions in school choice. This paper examines the welfare implications of two types of information interventions — providing students with common information (CI) and group-specific information (GI) — in a many-to-one matching model with a continuum of students and a finite set of schools. We show that while CI and GI perform similarly when adopted on a small scale, GI strictly outperforms CI when information uptake is high. At scale, CI generates congestion externalities that reduce the benefit to informed low-SES students and hurt both high-SES and uninformed low-SES students. GI eliminates this congestion. These findings also hold when the district implements affirmative action policies.

This project studies how information about university financial aid shapes the educational decisions of high-school students in Victoria, Australia. We designed a tailored Financial Aid Calculator to deliver personalised information and used it to document — and address — the information gap facing rural Australian youth. The Honours thesis underpinning this project was awarded first place in the Deakin Essay Competition (2022) and received the highest score in the Economics Honours cohort.