Efficient Matching in the School Choice Problem

Philip J. Reny

American Economic Review, 2022, vol. 112, issue 6, 2025-43

Abstract: Stable matchings in school choice needn't be Pareto efficient and can leave thousands of students worse off than necessary. Call a matching μ priority-neutral if no matching can make any student whose priority is violated by μ better off without violating the priority of some student who is made worse off. Call a matching priority-efficient if it is priority-neutral and Pareto efficient. We show that there is a unique priority-efficient matching and that it dominates every priority-neutral matching and every stable matching. Moreover, truth-telling is a maxmin optimal strategy for every student in the mechanism that selects the priority-efficient matching.

JEL-codes: C78 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1257/aer.20210240

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