Günnur Ege Bilgin

Publications:

• Preserving acquired rights in the re-placement of medical residents in Türkiye (joint with Orhan Aygün).
  2025, Review of Economic Design
  We analyze the re-placement mechanism implemented in Türkiye for reassigning doctors to residency programs after scoring errors were realized. By law, initial placements based on faulty scores are acquired rights, prohibiting re-placement to less favorable programs. This setup requires balancing fairness for doctors with improved rankings, preserving acquired rights, and adhering to program capacities. Our analysis focuses on the two-step serial dictatorship mechanism implemented by the Center for Assessment, Selection, and Placement (CASP) to address this problem. We show that the CASP mechanism violates fairness, such that higher-scoring doctors may justifiably envy the assignments of lower-scoring peers. Yet, when doctors adopt a weakly dominant strategy and truncate preferences below their initial placements, a more lenient notion of q-fairness is satisfied. Additionally, we show how manipulation incentives under the CASP mechanism lead to excessive deviations from target capacities. We propose the Acquired Rights Adjusted Serial Dictatorship (AR-SD) mechanism to prevent strategic manipulation and minimize deviations. Furthermore, we describe simple modifications to the CASP mechanism that render it equivalent to AR-SD. Finally, simulations using total deviations as a metric show that AR-SD consistently achieves fewer deviations than the CASP mechanism. 

• Assigning doctors to mandatory service hospitals: a strategy-proof approach
  2025, Central Bank Review
  I analyze the mechanism used to assign medical doctors to mandatory service positions in Türkiye. To address staffing gaps in underserved areas, the government requires newly graduated, specialized, or subspecialized doctors to work in designated hospitals. Doctors submit ranked preferences, and the current mechanism is equivalent to the Boston mechanism followed by a general lottery step, but without any priority structure on the hospital side. This lack of hospital preferences turns the assignment into a one-sided matching problem, where only doctors have preferences. Despite high satisfaction reports by the Ministry of Health – claiming most doctors are assigned to one of their top choices – the mechanism has significant drawbacks. Most importantly, the mechanism is not strategy-proof: doctors may benefit from misrepresenting their preferences. For example, some may list less-demanded but acceptable hospitals as top choices to avoid assignment to more undesirable locations. Such strategic behavior distorts the allocation and undermines transparency. Doctors also share strategies in online forums, introducing further inefficiencies. To address these issues, I propose replacing the current mechanism with random serial dictatorship (RSD). RSD is strategy-proof, eliminating incentives for manipulation, and offers a simpler, more transparent process for mandatory service assignments.

Working Papers:

• Decentralized Many-to-One Matching with Random Search (JMP)
  I analyze a canonical many-to-one matching market within a decentralized search model with frictions, where a finite number of firms and workers meet randomly until the market clears. I compare the stable matchings of the underlying market and equilibrium outcomes when time is nearly costless. In contrast to the case where each firm has just a single vacancy, I show that stable matchings are not obtained as easily. In particular, there may be no Markovian equilibrium that uniformly implements either the worker- or the firm-optimal stable matching in every subgame. The challenge results from the firms' ability to withhold capacity strategically. Yet, this is not the case for markets with vertical preferences on one side, and I construct the equilibrium strategy profile that leads to the unique stable matching almost surely. Moreover, multiple vacancies enable firms to implicitly collude and achieve unstable but firm-preferred matchings, even under Markovian equilibria. Finally, I identify one sufficient condition on preferences to rule out such opportunities.

• Placement with Assignment Guarantees and Semi-Flexible Capacities (joint with Orhan Aygün)
  We analyze an extension of the many-to-one placement problem, where some doctors are exogenously guaranteed a seat at a program, which defines a lower bound on their assignment. Respecting assignment guarantees, combined with the limited capacities of programs often violates fairness and leaves more preferred doctors unemployed. Pursuing fairness, a designer often has to deviate from the target capacities of programs. In order to prevent excessive deviations, we introduce two notions that are tailored to the environment: q-fairness and avoiding unnecessary slots. We present the Assignment-Guarantees-Adjusted Mechanism (AGAM) and show that it is the unique strategy-proof mechanism that satisfies q-fairness and avoids unnecessary slots whilst respecting assignment guarantees. Furthermore, among the mechanisms that are q-fair and respect guarantees, AGAM minimizes the deviation from the target capacities.

• Voting under Salience Bias and Strategic Extremism (joint with Cavit Görkem Destan)
  We present a model that demonstrates politicians strategically adopt extreme positions even when the voters are homogeneous and moderate. We examine the behavior of voters and electoral candidates under the assumption that the salience of political issues affects voting decisions through voter preferences. Voters have limited attention which is unintentionally captured by distinctive policies. We demonstrate that candidates who differ in their budget constraints along with voters who have such limited attention can account for extremist policies, even though voters are identical in their preferences. Subsequently, we examine the elections with decoy candidates, who are unlikely to win. Even though these candidates do not attract the voters, they might still influence the election outcome by altering salience. Moreover, we provide experimental evidence that salience affects consumer preferences and election outcomes.

• Fall 2025: Introduction to Microeconomics at TEDU

• Spring 2025: Intermediate Microeconomics at TEDU

• Spring 2025: Introduction to Macroeconomics at TEDU

• Fall 2024 & 2025: Graduate Microeconomics (Microeconomics I) at TEDU

• Fall 2024: Matching Theory and Market Design at TEDU

• Summer 2021,2022,2024: EC 101 - Introduction to Microeconomics at Bogazici University