Justifiable Priority Violations

Josu\'e Ortega and R. Pablo Arribillaga

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Making Deferred Acceptance more efficient requires priority violations, but which ones are justifiable? We argue that a priority can be justifiably violated if the affected student either (i) directly benefits from the improvement that caused said violation, or (ii) is unimprovable under any assignment that Pareto-dominates DA. We construct a ``just-below-cutoffs'' mechanism that always finds a justifiable DA-improvement whenever DA's outcome is inefficient, and build on it to construct an algorithm that expands justifiable improvements iteratively, converging to a matching that cannot be Pareto-improved by any justifiable outcome. Finally, we prove that both justifiability and consent frameworks have important limitations in reaching Pareto-efficient outcomes, and use data and simulations to quantify how binding these constraints are in practice.

Date: 2026-04, Revised 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.06396 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2604.06396

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().