Constrained School Choice

Guillaume Haeringer and Flip Klijn

UFAE and IAE Working Papers from Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC)

Abstract: Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the transition would lead to efficiency gains. The first two mechanisms are strategy-proof, but in practice student assignment procedures typically impede a student to submit a preference list that contains all his acceptable schools. We study the preference revelation game where students can only declare up to a fixed number of schools to be acceptable. We focus on the stability and efficiency of the Nash equilibrium outcomes. Our main results identify rather stringent necessary and sufficient conditions on the priorities to guarantee stability or efficiency of either of the two mechanisms. This stands in sharp contrast with the Boston mechanism which has been abandoned in many US school districts but nevertheless yields stable Nash equilibrium outcomes.

Keywords: school choice; matching; stability; Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm; top trading cycles; Boston mechanism; acyclic priority structure; truncation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D78 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2006-11-06, Revised 2008-12-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-edu, nep-gth, nep-hrm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://pareto.uab.es/wp/2006/67106.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Constrained school choice (2009)
Working Paper: Constrained School Choice (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aub:autbar:671.06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UFAE and IAE Working Papers from Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Xavier Vila ().