A college admissions clearinghouse

To study centralized college admissions, I advance the theory of stability for many-to-many matching markets with contracts. In particular, I show that the student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm (SPDA) produces a stable matching even when college choice rules do not satisfy path independence (or substitutability) but when they have path-independent modifications. In addition, I provide a comparative statics for SPDA and introduce a new monotonicity condition on choice rules when contracts may have different weights to study yield management. My framework opens new avenues for market-design research and raises questions about the standard assumptions made in the literature.