Implementing quotas in university admissions: An experimental investigation

Sebastian Braun, Nadja Dwenger, Dorothea Kübler and Alexander Westkamp

No 1761, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Abstract: Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions, which first allocates seats in the quota for top-grade students before allocating all other seats among remaining applicants. The second is a modified version of the student-proposing deferred acceptance (SDA) algorithm, which simultaneously allocates seats in all quotas. Our main result is that the current procedure, designed to give top-grade students an advantage, actually harms them, as students often fail to grasp the strategic issues involved. The modified SDA algorithm significantly improves the matching for top-grade students and could thus be a valuable tool for redesigning university admissions in Germany.

Keywords: college admissions; experiment; quotas; matching; Gale-Shapley mechanism; Boston mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C92 D78 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:1761

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