Family ties: school assignment with siblings

Umut Dur, Thayer Morrill () and William Phan ()
Additional contact information
Thayer Morrill: Department of Economics, North Carolina State University
William Phan: Department of Economics, North Carolina State University

Theoretical Economics, 2022, vol. 17, issue 1

Abstract: We introduce a generalization of the school choice problem motivated by the following observations: students are assigned to grades within schools, many students have siblings who are applying as well, and school districts commonly guarantee that siblings will attend the same school. This last condition disqualifies the standard approach of considering grades independently as it may separate siblings. We argue that the central criterion in school choice---elimination of justified envy---is now inadequate as it does not consider siblings. We propose a new solution concept, suitability, that addresses this concern, and we introduce a new family of strategy-proof mechanisms that satisfy it. Using data from the Wake County magnet school assignment, we demonstrate the impact on families of our proposed mechanism versus the ``naive'' assignment where sibling constraints are not taken into account.

Keywords: School choice; matching theory; matching with contracts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D47 D63 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01-20
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econtheory.org/ojs/index.php/te/article/viewFile/20220089/32994/946 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:the:publsh:4086

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Economics is currently edited by Simon Board, Todd D. Sarver, Juuso Toikka, Rakesh Vohra, Pierre-Olivier Weill

More articles in Theoretical Economics from Econometric Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin J. Osborne ().