Comparing School Choice And College Admission Mechanisms By Their Immunity To Strategic Admissions

Somouaoga Bonkoungou () and Alexander Nesterov
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Somouaoga Bonkoungou: National Research University Higher School of Economics

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these reforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had strong incentives to game the system, which caused dramatic consequences for non-strategic students. However, almost none of the new rules were strategy-proof. We explain this puzzle. We show that after the reforms the rules became more immune to strategic admissions: each student received a smaller set of schools that he can get in using a strategy, weakening incentives to manipulate. Simultaneously, the admission to each school became strategy-proof to a larger set of students, making the schools more available for non-strategic students. We also show that the existing explanation of the puzzle due to Pathak and S?onmez (2013) is incomplete

Keywords: matching market design; school choice; college admission; manipulability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D47 D78 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in WP BRP Series: Economics / EC, January 2020, pages 1-32

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Working Paper: Comparing School Choice and College Admission Mechanisms By Their Immunity to Strategic Admissions (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:222/ec/2020

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