Resolving Conflicting Preferences in School Choice: The “Boston Mechanism” Reconsidered

2011 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 399-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu ◽  
Yeon-Koo Che ◽  
Yosuke Yasuda
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
Ordinal Preferences ◽  
Boston Mechanism ◽  
Ex Ante ◽  
Deferred Acceptance Algorithm ◽  
Deferred Acceptance ◽  
Good Schools

Despite its widespread use, the Boston mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances compared to the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm (DA). By contrast, when students have the same ordinal preferences and schools have no priorities, we find that the Boston mechanism Pareto dominates the DA in ex ante welfare, that it may not harm but rather benefit participants who may not strategize well, and that, in the presence of school priorities, the Boston mechanism also tends to facilitate greater access than the DA to good schools for those lacking priorities at those schools. (JEL D82, I21, I28)

scholarly journals School Choice Design, Risk Aversion, and Cardinal Segregation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caterina Calsamiglia ◽  
Francisco Martínez-Mora ◽  
Antonio Miralles
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
Choice Procedure ◽  
Ordinal Preferences ◽  
Boston Mechanism ◽  
Public School Choice ◽  
Higher Types ◽  
Deferred Acceptance

Abstract We embed the problem of public school choice design in a model of local provision of education. We define cardinal (student) segregation as that emerging when families with identical ordinal preferences submit different rankings of schools in a centralised school choice procedure. With the Boston Mechanism (BM), when higher types are less risk-averse, and there is sufficient vertical differentiation of schools, any equilibrium presents cardinal segregation. Transportation costs facilitate the emergence of cardinal segregation as does competition from private schools. Furthermore, the latter renders the best public schools more elitist. The Deferred Acceptance mechanism is resilient to cardinal segregation.

scholarly journals Heterogeneous Beliefs and School Choice Mechanisms

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (5) ◽  
pp. 1274-1315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Kapor ◽  
Christopher A. Neilson ◽  
Seth D. Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
Rational Expectations ◽  
Choice Behavior ◽  
Heterogeneous Beliefs ◽  
Welfare Costs ◽  
Subjective Beliefs ◽  
Opposite Conclusion ◽  
Deferred Acceptance Algorithm ◽  
Deferred Acceptance ◽  
Strategy Proof

This paper studies how welfare outcomes in centralized school choice depend on the assignment mechanism when participants are not fully informed. Using a survey of school choice participants in a strategic setting, we show that beliefs about admissions chances differ from rational expectations values and predict choice behavior. To quantify the welfare costs of belief errors, we estimate a model of school choice that incorporates subjective beliefs. We evaluate the equilibrium effects of switching to a strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, and of improving households’ belief accuracy. We find that a switch to truthful reporting in the DA mechanism offers welfare improvements over the baseline given the belief errors we observe in the data, but that an analyst who assumed families had accurate beliefs would have reached the opposite conclusion. (JEL D83, H75, I21, I28)

scholarly journals Expanding “Choice” in School Choice

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu ◽  
Yeon-Koo Che ◽  
Yosuke Yasuda
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Ex Ante ◽  
Deferred Acceptance ◽  
School Preferences

Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance (henceforth DA) mechanism has emerged as a prominent candidate for placing students to public schools. While DA has desirable fairness and incentive properties, it limits the applicants' abilities to communicate their preference intensities, which entails ex ante inefficiency when ties at school preferences are broken randomly. We propose a variant of deferred acceptance mechanism that allows students to influence how they are treated in ties. It inherits much of the desirable properties of DA but performs better in ex ante efficiency. (JEL D82, H75, I21, I28)

scholarly journals What's the Matter with Tie-Breaking? Improving Efficiency in School Choice

2008 ◽  
Vol 98 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aytek Erdil ◽  
Haluk Ergin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Polynomial Time ◽  
Polynomial Time Algorithm ◽  
Time Algorithm ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stable Mechanism ◽  
Deferred Acceptance Algorithm ◽  
Deferred Acceptance ◽  
Stable Improvement

In several school choice districts in the United States, the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm is applied after indifferences in priority orders are broken in some exogenous way. Although such a tie-breaking procedure preserves stability, it adversely affects the welfare of the students since it introduces artificial stability constraints. Our main finding is a polynomial-time algorithm for the computation of a student-optimal stable matching when priorities are weak. The idea behind our construction relies on a new notion which we call a stable improvement cycle. We also investigate the strategic properties of the student-optimal stable mechanism. (JEL C78, D82, I21)

scholarly journals Information acquisition and provision in school choice: a theoretical investigation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Chen ◽  
YingHua He
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Information Acquisition ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Information Provision ◽  
Welfare Effects ◽  
Ordinal Preferences ◽  
Acquisition Costs ◽  
Deferred Acceptance ◽  
Welfare Ranking

AbstractWhen participating in school choice, students may incur information acquisition costs to learn about school quality. This paper investigates how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Specifically, we show that only the Immediate Acceptance mechanism incentivizes students to learn their own cardinal and others’ preferences. We demonstrate that information acquisition costs affect the efficiency of each mechanism and the welfare ranking between the two. In the case where everyone has the same ordinal preferences, we evaluate the welfare effects of various information provision policies by education authorities.

scholarly journals Designing Random Allocation Mechanisms: Theory and Applications

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 585-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Budish ◽  
Yeon-Koo Che ◽  
Fuhito Kojima ◽  
Paul Milgrom
Keyword(s):  
Resource Allocation ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Real World ◽  
Random Allocation ◽  
Assignment Problems ◽  
Matching Problems ◽  
House Allocation ◽  
Controlled Choice ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
Ex Ante

Randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation. We generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi-unit allocations and various real-world constraints, such as group-specific quotas (“controlled choice”) in school choice and house allocation, and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation. We develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments, and that incorporate certain non-additive substitutable preferences. We also develop a “utility guarantee” technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations, supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization. This can be applied to multi-unit assignment problems and certain two-sided matching problems. (JEL C78, D82)

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document