 Ex-ante fairness in the Boston and serial dictatorship mechanisms under pre-exam and post-exam preference submissionJaimie W. Lien, Jie Zheng and Xiaohan Zhong Games and Economic Behavior, 2017, vol. 101, issue C, 98-120 Abstract: In a school choice mechanism, school priorities are often based on student exam scores, by which student true ability may not be perfectly revealed. An ex-post fair matching mechanism (for example, Serial Dictatorship) can be undesirable in that it is not ex-ante fair: it may not match students with higher abilities to better schools, although it always matches students with higher scores to better schools. In this paper we consider a potential way of improving ex-ante fairness – a Boston mechanism with the requirement that students submit their preferences before the exam score is realized (the “pre-BOS mechanism”). This mechanism is more likely to achieve complete ex-ante fairness, in that students with higher ability are always matched with better schools. However, the other mechanisms (pre-/post-SD and post-BOS) can always implement stochastic ex-ante fairness (students with higher ability having higher probability of admission to better schools), while pre-BOS may not. Keywords: Preference submission timing; Boston; Serial dictatorship; Ex-ante fairness; Constrained school choice (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:101:y:2017:i:c:p:98-120 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2016.07.003 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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