Constrained School Choice: An Experimental QRE Analysis

Jorge Alcalde-Unzu, Marc Vorsatz and Flip Klijn

No 1270, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: The theoretical literature on public school choice proposes centralized mechanisms that assign children to schools on the basis of parents' preferences and the priorities children have for different schools. The related experimental literature analyzes in detail how various mechanisms fare in terms of welfare and stability of the resulting matchings, yet often provides only aggregate statistics of the individual behavior that leads to these outcomes (i.e., the degree to which subjects tell the truth in the induced simultaneous move game). In this paper, we show that the quantal response equilibrium (QRE) adequately describes individual behavior and the resulting matching in three constrained problems for which the immediate acceptance mechanism and the student-optimal stable mechanism coincide. Specifically, the comparative statics of the logit-QRE with risk-neutral and expected-payoff-maximizing agents capture the directional changes of subject behavior and the prevalence of the different stable matchings when cardinal payoffs (i.e., relative preference intensities) are modified in the experiment.

Keywords: laboratory experiment; school choice; Boston mechanism; immediate acceptance mechanism; quantal response equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 C92 D78 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-des, nep-exp and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/1270-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Constrained school choice: an experimental QRE analysis (2023)
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:bge:wpaper:1270

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().