Strategy-proofness and stability of the Boston mechanism: An almost impossibility result

Taro Kumano

Journal of Public Economics, 2013, vol. 105, issue C, 23-29

Abstract: Public school systems generally use one of the three competing mechanisms – the Boston mechanism, the deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycle mechanism – for assigning students to specific schools. Although the literature generally claims that the Boston mechanism is Pareto efficient but neither stable nor strategy-proof, this study delineates a subset of school priority structures for which it fulfills all three criteria. We show that the Boston mechanism is stable if and only if it is strategy-proof if and only if the priority structure is strongly acyclic. However, we find that the condition of strong acyclicity is nearly impossible to satisfy: any priority structure is quasi-cyclic whenever there are two schools whose admission quotas are less than the number of students seeking admission.

Keywords: Boston mechanism; Stability; Strategy-proofness; Quasi-cyclicity; Strong acyclicity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C78 D71 D78 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:105:y:2013:i:c:p:23-29

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2013.05.008

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