Market design · Matching markets · Economics of education

Thilo Klein

I study how scarce resources can be allocated with algorithms, and what allocation procedures achieve in practice.

I design and evaluate these procedures together with municipalities.

• Professor · Pforzheim University
• Senior Researcher · ZEW Mannheim

CV For municipalities All publications

• [email protected]
• ORCID
• RePEc
• GitHub

Published in

Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, Administrative Sciences

Featured by

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, WirtschaftsWoche, Tagesspiegel, Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau and MDR

Applications

For municipalities and government

Childcare places

Coordinated allocation across all providers: families hold at most one offer, and released places are passed on immediately. In use in more than ten municipalities, including Tübingen and Kaiserslautern.

The procedure

School places

Which procedures best meet preferences at the transition to secondary school, and what early tracking does.

The research

Food donations

Real-time allocation of surplus food to food bank outlets, so that less goes to waste.

The approach

Environmental subsidies

How subsidy programmes for eco-friendly products can better reach households that would not buy without support.

The approach

Research

Working papers

1. Experimental School Choice with Parents

   With M. Freer and J. Ortega · arXiv 2603.24615, 2026

2. Sorting, Status, and Shadow Education: How Track Placement Shapes Parental Investment

   With S. McNamara · ZEW Discussion Paper 25-023, 2025

3. Access, Achievements, and Aspirations: The Impacts of School Tracking on Student Outcomes

   With M. Bach and S. McNamara · ZEW Discussion Paper 24-076, 2024

4. Matching for Credit: Identifying Information Asymmetries in Joint-Liability Lending

   Single-authored · ZEW Discussion Paper 24-070, 2024

Selected publications

• Games and Economic Behavior
  School Choice with Independent versus Consolidated Districts

  With R. Aue and J. Ortega (2024)

• Games and Economic Behavior
  The Cost of Strategy-Proofness in School Choice

  With J. Ortega (2023)

• Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design
  A Deferred Acceptance Mechanism for Decentralized, Fast and Fair Childcare Assignment

  With T. Reischmann and S. Giegerich (2021)

All publications

Media

Listen

The Missing Middle

Game Changer, May 2026. How market design actually gets built for the public sector, using childcare allocation as the example.

Listen ↗

How are school places allocated?

ZEW podcast, September 2026, in German. On early tracking, in conversation with secondary school pupils from Mannheim.

Listen ↗

On Your Spots, Get Set, Go?

ZEW podcast, in German. How KitaMatch allocates childcare places faster and more fairly.

Listen ↗

Profile

Teaching and Transfer

Current teaching

• Analysis and Linear Algebra
• Inferential Statistics
• Multivariate Statistics
• Data Analytics with R
• Quantitative Research Methodologies

Current Projects

• MatchingTools, EXIST research transfer project, Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, 2026–2027
• TafelConnect, Real-time allocation of surplus food to food bank, Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, 2023-2026.

Software

• matchingMarkets. R package with algorithms for matching markets, downloaded more than 100,000 times. Project page ↗, CRAN ↗.
• KitaMatch. Public guide (in German): Best practices for childcare allocation ↗; operated by MatchingTools ↗.
• MatchingMarkets API ↗ is an application programming interface for matching algorithms.

Research transfer

• Co-founder and scientific advisor at MatchingTools GmbH ↗, a ZEW spin-out. When evaluating procedures whose implementation involves MatchingTools, I disclose this connection.
• EXIST coordinator at Pforzheim Business School