School Choice with Consent: An Experiment

Claudia Cerrone, Yoan Hermstrüwer () and Onur Kesten ()
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Yoan Hermstrüwer: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Onur Kesten: School of Economics, The University of Sydney

No 2022_02, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: Public school choice often yields student assignments that are neither fair nor efficient. The efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism (EADAM) allows students to consent to waive priorities that have no effect on their assignments. A burgeoning recent literature places EADAM at the center of the trade-off between efficiency and fairness in school choice. Meanwhile, the Flemish Ministry of Education has taken the first steps to implement this algorithm in Belgium. We provide the first experimental evidence on the performance of EADAM against the celebrated deferred acceptance mechanism (DA). We find that both efficiency and truth-telling rates are higher under EADAM than under DA, even though EADAM is not strategy-proof. When the priority waiver is enforced, efficiency further increases, while truth-telling rates decrease relative to the EADAM variants where students can dodge the waiver. Our results challenge the importance of strategy-proofness as a prerequisite for truth-telling and portend a new trade-off between efficiency and vulnerability to preference manipulation.

Keywords: efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance algorithm; school choice; consent; default rules; law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C92 D47 I20 K10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02-09, Revised 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-exp, nep-his, nep-law and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Journal Article: School Choice with Consent: an Experiment (2024)
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