Affirmative Action through Minority Reserves: An Experimental Study on School Choice

Joana Pais (), Marc Vorsatz and Flip Klijn

No 752, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: Minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by Hafalir et al. (2013) in the context of school choice. We study in the laboratory the effect of minority reserves on the outcomes of two prominent matching mechanisms, the Gale-Shapley and the Top Trading Cycles mechanisms. Our first experimental result is that the introduction of minority reserves enhances truth-telling of some minority students under the Gale-Shapley but not under the Top Trading Cycles mechanism. Secondly, for the Gale-Shapley mechanism we also find that the stable matchings that are more beneficial to students are obtained more often relative to the other stable matchings when minority reserves are introduced. Finally, the overall expected payoff increases under the Gale-Shapley but decreases under the Top Trading Cycles mechanism if minority reserves are introduced. However, the minority group benefits and the majority group is harmed under both mechanisms.

Keywords: outsourcing; sequencing situations; first best solution; game theory; price of anarchy; coordinating mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 C92 D78 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Affirmative action through minority reserves: An experimental study on school choice (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:752

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