Games of School Choice under the Boston Mechanism

Haluk Ergin and Tayfun Sönmez
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Haluk Ergin: MIT

No 619, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: Many school districts in the U.S. use a student assignment mechanism that we refer to as the Boston mechanism. Under this mechanism a student loses his priority at a school unless his parents rank it as their first choice. Therefore parents are given incentives to rank high on their list the schools where the student has a good chance of getting in. We characterize the Nash equilibria of the induced preference revelation game. An important policy implication of our result is that a transition from the Boston mechanism to the student-optimal stable mechanism would lead to unambiguous efficiency gains.

Keywords: student assignment; Boston mechanism; induced preference revelation; mechanism design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D61 D78 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-gth and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Forthcoming, Journal of Public Economics

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Related works:
Journal Article: Games of school choice under the Boston mechanism (2006)
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