The Performance of School Assignment Mechanisms in Practice

Monique De Haan, Pieter Gautier, Hessel Oosterbeek and Bas van der Klaauw

No 9118, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Theory points to a potential trade-off between two main school assignment mechanisms; Boston and Deferred Acceptance (DA). While DA is strategy-proof and gives a stable matching, Boston might outperform DA in terms of ex-ante efficiency. We quantify the (dis)advantages of the mechanisms by using information about actual choices under Boston complemented with survey data eliciting students' school preferences. We find that under Boston around 8% of the students apply to another school than their most-preferred school. We compare allocations resulting from Boston with DA with single tie-breaking (one central lottery; DA-STB) and multiple tie-breaking (separate lottery per school; DA-MTB). DA-STB places more students in their top-n schools, for any n, than Boston and results in higher average welfare. We find a trade-off between DA-STB and DA-MTB. DA-STB places more students in their single most-preferred school than DA-MTB, but fewer in their top-n, for n ? 2. Finally, students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit most from a switch from Boston to any of the DA mechanisms.

Keywords: school choice; Boston mechanism; deferred acceptance mechanism; strategic behavior; ex-ante efficiency; ex-post efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 D47 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gth and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Published - published in: Journal of Political Economy, 2023, 131 (2), 388 - 455

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Performance of School Assignment Mechanisms in Practice (2023)
Working Paper: The performance of school assignment mechanisms in practice (2015)
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