A position assignment experiment among active duty United States Navy physicians

The United States Navy (USN) assigns personnel to jobs via assignments officers; placement guidance exists but the process is decentralized. Participant attitudes towards and limited experience with market design are possible impediments to its incorporation into the assignment process. We investigate the appetite for the use of the deferred acceptance during the assignment process. We implemented a pilot project incorporating deferred acceptance into 231 assignments of 174 USN physicians to 23 commands. Pre-intervention, we surveyed physicians to obtain baseline perceptions of the traditional assignment process; post-intervention we surveyed pilot project participants. Only 38.2% of pre-pilot survey respondents said they preferred assignment via deferred acceptance; in the post-pilot survey 78.7% of participating physicians and 87.8% of participating commands reported a desire to keep using deferred acceptance. Our study suggests that attitudes towards using market design in personnel assignment may improve with experience, facilitating broader acceptance of its usage in the future.