Local non-bossiness

Eduardo Duque-Rosas, Juan S. Pereyra and Juan Pablo Torres-Martínez

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The student-optimal stable mechanism (DA), the most popular mechanism in school choice, is the only one that is stable and strategy-proof. However, when DA is implemented, a student can change the schools of others without changing her own. We show that this drawback is limited: a student cannot change her schoolmates while remaining at the same school. We refer to this new property as local non-bossiness and use it to provide a new characterization of DA that does not rely on stability. Furthermore, we show that local non-bossiness plays a crucial role in providing incentives to be truthful when students have preferences over their colleagues. As long as students have school-lexicographic preferences over colleagues—meaning that they first consider the school to which they are assigned and then their schoolmates—DA induces the only stable and strategy-proof mechanism. There is limited room to expand this preference domain without compromising the existence of a stable and strategy-proof mechanism.

Keywords: local non-bossiness; preferences over colleagues; school choice; student-optimal stable mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2026-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Economic Theory, 30, September, 2026, 236. ISSN: 0022-0531

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/140789/ Open access version. (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:ehl:lserod:140789

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().