Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions

A menu description presents a mechanism to player i in two steps. Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i's menu: the set of i's potential outcomes. Step (2) uses i's report to select i's favorite outcome from her menu. Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity? We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance. We prove that--in contrast with other common matching mechanisms--this menu description must differ substantially from the corresponding traditional description. We demonstrate, with a lab experiment on two elementary mechanisms, the promise and challenges of menu descriptions.