How Lotteries in School Choice Help to Level the Playing Field

Christian Basteck, Bettina Klaus (bettina.klaus@unil.ch) and Dorothea Kuebler
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Dorothea Kübler

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: School authorities in the UK and the US advocate the use of lotteries to help desegregate schools. Inspired by the current school choice mechanism in Berlin, we study lottery quotas embedded in the deferred acceptance (DA) and immediate acceptance (IA) mechanisms. Some seats are allocated based on academic achievement (e.g.,grades) and some based on a lottery. We focus on the e ect of the lottery quota on truth-telling, stability, the utility of students, and the student composition at schools, using theory and experiments. We find that in theory a lottery quota strengthens truth-telling in DA by eliminating non-truth-telling equilibria. The equilibrium outcome of DA with a lottery is stable while this is not the case for IA with a lottery. Both predictions are borne out in the experiment. Moreover,the lottery quota leads to more diverse school populations in the experiment, as predicted. Comparing the two mechanisms, students with the lowest grades profit more from the introduction of the lottery under IA than under DA.

Keywords: School choice; immediate acceptance mechanism; deferred acceptance mechanism; lotteries; experiment; market design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 D82 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 74 pp.
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-exp and nep-ure
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Related works:
Journal Article: How lotteries in school choice help to level the playing field (2021)
Working Paper: How Lotteries in School Choice Help to Level the Playing Field (2021)
Working Paper: How Lotteries in School Choice Help to Level the Playing Field (2018)
Working Paper: How Lotteries in School Choice Help to Level the Playing Field (2018)
Working Paper: How lotteries in school choice help to level the playing field (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:19.09

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