A theory of school choice lotteries

Onur Kesten () and Utku Unver
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Onur Kesten: Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University

Theoretical Economics, 2015, vol. 10, issue 2

Abstract: A new mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others. We introduce a new framework for school-choice problems and two notions of fairness in lottery design based on ex-ante stability. This framework unifies known many-to-one and one-sided matching models. We show that the NYC/Boston mechanism fails to satisfy these fairness properties. We then propose two new mechanisms, one that is ordinally Pareto-dominant within the class of strongly ex-ante stable mechanisms and one that satisfies ex-ante stability, equal treatment, and constrained ordinal-Pareto-efficiency.

Keywords: Matching; school choice; deferred acceptance; stability; ordinal efficiency; market design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C78 D71 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05-27
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

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Related works:
Working Paper: A Theory of School-Choice Lotteries (2012)
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