Preference Intensities and Risk Aversion in School Choice: A Laboratory Experiment

Flip Klijn, Joana Pais () and Marc Vorsatz

No 10-093, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: We experimentally investigate in the laboratory two prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools. We study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the Gale-Shapley mechanism is more robust to changes in cardinal preferences than the Boston mechanism independently of whether individuals can submit a complete or only a restricted ranking of the schools and (b) subjects with a higher degree of risk aversion are more likely to play "safer" strategies under the Gale-Shapley but not under the Boston mechanism. Both results have important implications for the efficiency and the stability of the mechanisms.

Keywords: school choice; risk aversion; preference intensities; laboratory experiment; Gale-Shapley mechanism; Boston mechanism; efficiency; stability; constrained choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 C92 D78 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2010-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-upt and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Preference Intensities and Risk Aversion in School Choice: A Laboratory Experiment (2015)
Journal Article: Preference intensities and risk aversion in school choice: a laboratory experiment (2013)
Working Paper: Preference Intensities and Risk Aversion in School Choice: A Laboratory Experiment (2010)
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