Fair implementation of diversity in school choice

Inacio Bo

Games and Economic Behavior, 2016, vol. 97, issue C, 54-63

Abstract: Many school districts have objectives regarding how students of different races, ethnicity or religious backgrounds should be distributed across schools. A growing literature in mechanism design is introducing school choice mechanisms that attempt to satisfy those requirements. We show that mechanisms based on the student-proposing deferred acceptance may fail to satisfy those objectives, but that by using instead the school-proposing deferred acceptance together with a choice function used by the schools, which incorporates a preference for satisfying them, can optimally approximate the diversity objectives while still satisfying an appropriate fairness criterion. We provide analytical results which show that the proposed mechanism has a general ability to satisfy those objectives, as opposed to some currently proposed mechanisms, which may yield segregated assignments.

Keywords: Mechanism design; Matching; School choice; Affirmative action; Diversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D63 D78 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:97:y:2016:i:c:p:54-63

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2016.03.003

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