Umut Dur
Economics
Truist Distinguished Professor of Economics
Director of Graduate Programs
Economics
Nelson Hall 4104
919.513.2869 udur@ncsu.eduBio
Umut Dur is the Truist Distinguished Professor of Economics and Director of Graduate Programs within the Economics Department at NC State. Before that he was a teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Austin (2010-2012), and Bogazici University (2007-2008)>
Education
Ph.D. Economics University of Texas at Austin 2013
M.A. Economics Bogazici University 2009
B.S. Industrial Engineering Bogazici University 2006
Area(s) of Expertise
Market design, school choice and matching theory.
Publications
- College admissions with budget complementarities , International Journal of Game Theory (2026)
- Hajj Quota Allocation as a Market Design Problem , SSRN Electronic Journal (2026)
- Improving the deferred acceptance with minimal compromise , Games and Economic Behavior (2025)
- Seat allocation problem in public transportation , Scandinavian Journal of Economics (2025)
- The attraction of magnet schools: Evidence from embedded lotteries in school assignment , Economics of Education Review (2025)
- A characterization of the top trading cycles mechanism for the school choice problem , Mathematical Social Sciences (2024)
- Capacity design in school choice , Games and Economic Behavior (2024)
- Increasing the representation of a targeted type in a reserve system , Mathematical Social Sciences (2024)
- Partitionable choice functions and stability , Social Choice and Welfare (2024)
- Rawlsian Matching , Mathematical Social Sciences (2024)
Grants
Centralized school assignment has been a recent and very successful application of economic theory to practical market design. School districts in US, including Seattle, Minneapolis, and Charlotte, use a mechanism called Boston mechanism that incentivizes students to be strategic when they report their preferences. School districts are concerned about the fact that the strategic students can benefit at the expense of the sincere students. In this project, we aim to test whether the availability of partial information about the popularity of the schools and ability of students to best respond it diminishes the harm done on the sincere students when using Boston mechanism. It is not possible to measure the effects of dynamic best responding behavior using real-world data as the students’ true preferences are not known. Therefore, we plan on running an experiment in order to test the performance of dynamic best responding. We can convincingly demonstrate through experiments that allowing students to best respond minimize the harm to the sincere students, then we anticipate school districts mentioned above will decide to implement this application procedure.