Minimal-Access Rights in School Choice and the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism

Bettina Klaus and Flip Klijn

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

Abstract: A classical school choice problem consists of a set of schools with priorities over students and a set of students with preferences over schools. Schools' priorities are often based on multiple criteria, e.g., merit-based test scores as well as minimal-access rights (siblings attending the school, students' proximity to the school, etc.). Traditionally, minimal-access rights are incorporated into priorities by always giving minimal-access students higher priority over non-minimal-access students. However, stability based on such adjusted priorities can be considered unfair because a minimal-access student may be admitted to a popular school while another student with higher merit-score but without minimal-access right is rejected, even though the former minimal-access student could easily attend another of her minimal-access schools. We therefore weaken stability to minimal-access stability: minimal-access rights only promote access to at most one minimal-access school. Apart from minimal-access stability, we also would want a school choice mechanism to satisfy strategy-proofness and minimal-access monotonicity, i.e., additional minimal-access rights for a student do not harm her. Our main result is that the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism is the only mechanism that satisfies minimal-access stability, strategy-proofness, and minimal-access monotonicity. Since this mechanism is in fact stable, our result can be interpreted as an impossibility result: fairer outcomes that are made possible by the weaker property of minimal-access stability are incompatible with strategy-proofness and minimal-access monotonicity.

Keywords: school choice; priorities; minimal-access rights; justified envy; stability; deferred acceptance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D47 D63 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pp.
Date: 2021-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Minimal-Access Rights in School Choice and the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:21.11

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