Evaluating the Effects of a Matching Market Design Intervention

Every year thousands of officers in the United States Army participate in a matching market for transfers to new units within the military. Currently, this officer to unit matching is implemented manually by the US Army’s Human Resources Command. This matching is time intensive for the Army’s Human Resources Command to implement and is opaque to participants. We propose measuring the impact of replacing this baseline matching mechanism with a deferred acceptance algorithm, which is incentive-compatible and more transparent to participants, through a randomized controlled trial. Specifically, disjoint markets of officers will be randomly assigned to match using the DAA or the baseline mechanism. We will measure the impact of this intervention on officers’ and units’ preferences over assigned matches, performance, and satisfaction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first RCT to evaluate a market design intervention.