Strategic schools under the Boston mechanism revisited

Inacio Bo and C.-Philipp Heller ()
Additional contact information
C.-Philipp Heller: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Social Choice and Welfare, 2017, vol. 48, issue 3, No 4, 545-572

Abstract: Abstract Ergin and Sönmez (J Public Econ 90(1):215–237, 2006) showed that for schools it is a dominant strategy to report their preferences truthfully under the Boston mechanism, and that the Nash equilibrium outcomes in undominated strategies of the induced game are stable. We show that these results rely crucially on two assumptions. First, schools need to be restricted to reporting all students as acceptable. Second, students cannot observe the preferences reported by the schools before submitting their own preferences. We show that relaxing either assumption gives schools an incentive to manipulate their reported preferences. We provide a full characterization of undominated strategies for schools and students for the simultaneous move game induced by the Boston mechanism. Nash equilibrium outcomes in undominated strategies of that game may contain unstable matchings. Furthermore, when students observe schools’ preferences before submitting theirs, the subgame perfect Nash equilibria of the sequential game induced by the Boston mechanism may also contain unstable matchings. Finally, we show that schools may have an incentive to manipulate capacities only if students observe the schools’ strategies before submitting their own preferences.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-016-1024-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Strategic schools under the Boston mechanism revisited (2016)
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:spr:sochwe:v:48:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s00355-016-1024-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-016-1024-6

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().