Smart Matching Platforms and Heterogeneous Beliefs in Centralized School Choice

Felipe Arteaga, Adam J Kapor, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, vol. 137, issue 3, 1791-1848

Abstract: Many school districts with centralized school choice adopt strategy-proof assignment mechanisms to relieve applicants from needing to strategize based on beliefs about their own admissions chances. This article shows that beliefs about admissions chances shape choice outcomes even when the assignment mechanism is strategy-proof by influencing how applicants search for schools and that “smart matching platforms” that provide live feedback on admissions chances help applicants search more effectively. Motivated by a model in which applicants engage in costly search for schools and overoptimism can lead to undersearch, we use data from a large-scale survey of choice participants in Chile to show that learning about schools is hard, beliefs about admissions chances guide the decision to stop searching, and applicants systematically underestimate nonplacement risk. We use RCT and RD research designs to evaluate scaled live feedback policies in the Chilean and New Haven choice systems. Twenty-two percent of applicants submitting applications where risks of nonplacement are high respond to warnings by adding schools to their lists, reducing nonplacement risk by 58% and increasing test score value added at the schools where they enroll by 0.10 standard deviations. Reducing the burden of school choice requires not just strategy-proofness inside the centralized system but also choice supports for the strategic decisions that inevitably remain outside of it.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjac013 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Smart Matching Platforms and Heterogeneous Beliefs in Centralized School Choice (2021)
Working Paper: Smart Matching Platforms and Heterogeneous Beliefs in Centralized School Choice (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:137:y:2022:i:3:p:1791-1848.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().