Gaming the Boston School Choice Mechanism in Beijing

Yinghua He

No 15-551, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: The Boston mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performance compared with the deferred-acceptance mechanism (DA). Using school choice data from Beijing where the Boston mechanism without school priorities is adopted, I investigate parents' behavior and allow for possible mistakes. Evidence shows that parents are overcautious because they play ``safe'' strategies too often. There is no evidence that wealthier/more-educated parents are more adept at strategizing. If others behave as indicated in the data, an average naive parent who always reports her true preferences experiences a utility loss in switching from the Boston to the DA mechanism (equivalent to random serial dictatorship in this setting), corresponding to an 8% increase in the distance from home to school or substituting a 13% chance at the best school with an equal chance at the second-best school. She has a 27% (55%) chance of being better (worse) off. If parents are instead either sophisticated (they always play a best response against others) or naive, the results are mixed: under DA, naive parents enjoy a utility gain on average when less than 80% of the population is naive, while still about 42% are worse off and only 39% are better off. Sophisticated parents always lose more.

Keywords: Boston Immediate-Acceptance Mechanism; Gale-Shapley Deferred-Acceptance Mechanism; School Choice; Bayesian Nash Equilibrium; Strategy-Proofness; Moment Inequalities; Maximin Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C57 C72 D47 D61 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01, Revised 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-upt and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/by/he/bm.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gaming the Boston School Choice Mechanism in Beijing (2012)
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:tse:wpaper:28970

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().