Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Our main outcomes are selected to indirectly measure three well-known, and sometimes competing, goals of market design mechanisms: strategyproofness, efficiency, and stability.
Officers will be asked about whether they strategically manipulated their preferences in two surveys. They were first asked about strategic manipulation in a survey administered on the platform where they submit or review their preferences about two weeks before their preferences were due. They will be asked a similar set of questions again when they receive their assigned match in February 2020. We will use these reports to assess whether officers matched with the deferred acceptance algorithm truthfully reported their preferences at a higher rate than officers in the control group.
We will measure the efficiency of the match in two ways. First, following the literature assessing the welfare consequences of centralized assignment in the student-to-school setting (Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak, and Roth, 2009; Abdulkadiroğlu, Agarwal, and Pathak, 2017), we will measure efficiency using officers’ and units’ rank-ordered preferences over potential matches. This is a measure of ex-ante satisfaction with a match. We will also measure realized job satisfaction via survey questions that will be including in Human Resource Command's existing officer surveys.
Of course, another important dimension of efficiency is whether the match is more productive. We will measure this aspect of efficiency using promotion outcomes and officer’s annual performance evaluations. Our main promotion outcome will be the time to the next promotion. The performance evaluations include a categorical rating (Most qualified, Highly qualified, Qualified, and Unqualified) and a text-based evaluation that can be mapped to a rank ordered performance rating that is highly predictive of future promotions. In particular, we will use the predicted rank from the text-based evaluation as a quantitative measure of performance.
In addition to strategyproofness, one of the most often cited benefits of the deferred acceptance algorithm is that it yields a match that is stable in the sense that no unmatched worker-firm pair would prefer being matched together to their assigned match. The theoretical guarantees of stability are based on the preference reports submitted prior to the match. We will measure whether the matches are more stable in the long-run by looking at officers’ retention in their assigned matches and also with the Army. During the three-year project period, we will measure retention using one- and two-year retention rates. In addition, we will measure retention outcomes for as long as our data agreement allows.