Improving Transparency and Verifiability in School Admissions: Theory and Experiment

Rustamdjan Hakimov and Madhav Raghavan
Additional contact information
Madhav Raghavan: University of Lausanne

No 376, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Students participating in centralized admissions procedures do not typically have access to the information used to determine their matched school, such as other students' preferences or school priorities. This can lead to doubts about whether their matched schools were computed correctly (the 'Verifiability Problem') or, at a deeper level, whether the promised admissions procedure was even used (the 'Transparency Problem'). In a general centralized admissions model that spans many popular applications, we show how these problems can be addressed by providing appropriate feedback to students, even without disclosing sensitive private information like other students' preferences or school priorities. In particular, we show that the Verifiability Problem can be solved by (1) publicly communicating the minimum scores required to be matched to a school ('cutoffs'); or (2) using `predictable' preference elicitation procedures that convey rich 'experiential' information. In our main result, we show that the Transparency Problem can be solved by using cutoffs and predictable procedures together. We find strong support for these solutions in a laboratory experiment, and show how they can be simply implemented for popular school admissions applications involving top trading cycles, and deferred and immediate acceptance.

Keywords: school choice; matching; transparency; cutoffs; dynamic mechanisms; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C78 D78 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-01-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-exp and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/ ... ussion_paper/376.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:rco:dpaper:376

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Viviana Lalli ().