Matching Impacts of School Admission Mechanisms: An Agent-Based Approach

Shu-Heng Chen, Connie Houning Wang () and Weikai Chen ()
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Connie Houning Wang: Walden University
Weikai Chen: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Eastern Economic Journal, 2017, vol. 43, issue 2, No 3, 217-241

Abstract: Matching mechanisms are critical in determining the assignments of students to schools. We used agent-based modeling (ABM) to simulate the three mechanisms experienced in the fiercely competitive admission systems in China: serial dictatorship (SD), the Boston mechanism (BM), and the Chinese parallel mechanism (CP). We evaluated their multifaceted outcomes under different policy settings, school capacities, and behavioral assumptions. We have replicated their major characteristics found in the analytical models and showed that CP behaves as a hybrid of SD and BM. ABM allows us to distinguish their aggregate effects from distributional effects and their long-term level effects from short-term volatility effects. We found that this kind of “out-of-equilibrium’’ analysis, while mostly absent in the analytical equilibrium analysis, is crucial for practical policy analysis.

Keywords: matching mechanism; agent-based modeling; serial dictatorship; Boston mechanism; Chinese parallel; I28; C63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1057/s41302-016-0073-y

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