on Collective Goods, Bonn

The study of matching problems typically assumes that agents pre-cisely know their preferences over the goods to be assigned. Within applied contexts, this assumption stands out as particularly coun-terfactual. Parents typically do invest a large amount of time and resources to find the best school for their children; doctors run costly tests to establish the best kidney for a given patient. In this paper I introduce the assumption of endogenous information acquisition into otherwise standard house allocation problems. I find that there is a unique ex-ante Pareto-optimal, strategy-proof and non-bossy alloca-tion mechanism: serial dictatorship. This stands in sharp contrast to the very large set of such mechanisms for house allocation problems without endogenous information acquisition