From Boston to Chinese parallel to deferred acceptance: theory and experiments on a family of school choice mechanisms
01 Jan 2013-pp 71
TL;DR: The authors characterize a parametric family of application-rejection school choice mechanisms, including the Boston and deferred acceptance mechanisms as special cases, and spanning the parallel mechanisms for Chinese college admissions, the largest centralized matching in the world.
Abstract: We characterize a parametric family of application-rejection school choice mechanisms, including the Boston and Deferred Acceptance mechanisms as special cases, and spanning the parallel mechanisms for Chinese college admissions, the largest centralized matching in the world. Moving from one extreme member to the other results in systematic changes in manipulability, stability and welfare properties. Neither the ex-post dominance of the DA over the Boston equilibria, nor the ex-ante dominance of the Boston equilibria over the DA in stylized settings extends to the parallel mechanisms. In the laboratory, participants are most likely to reveal their preferences truthfully under the DA mechanism, followed by the Chinese parallel and then the Boston mechanisms. Furthermore, while the DA is significantly more stable than the Chinese parallel mechanism, which is more stable than Boston, efficiency comparisons vary across environments.
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References
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TL;DR: Z-Tree as mentioned in this paper is a toolbox for ready-made economic experiments, which allows programming almost any kind of experiments in a short time and is stable and easy to use.
Abstract: z-Tree (Zurich Toolbox for Ready-made Economic Experiments) is a software for developing and conducting economic experiments. The software is stable and allows programming almost any kind of experiments in a short time. In this article, I present the guiding principles behind the software design, its features, and its limitations.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the relationship between college admission and the stability of marriage in the United States, and found that college admission is correlated with the number of stable marriages.
Abstract: (2013). College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage. The American Mathematical Monthly: Vol. 120, No. 5, pp. 386-391.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors formulate the school choice problem as a mechanism design problem and analyze some of the existing school choice plans including those in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, and Seattle, and offer two alternative mechanisms each of which may provide a practical solution to some critical school choice issues.
Abstract: A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appeals by unsatisfied parents. We formulate the school choice problem as a mechanism design problem and analyze some of the existing school choice plans including those in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, and Seattle. We show that these existing plans have serious shortcomings, and offer two alternative mechanisms each of which may provide a practical solution to some critical school choice issues.
1,446 citations
Additional excerpts
...Shortly after Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez (2003) was published, New York City public schools decided to replace its allocation mechanism with a capped version of the studentproposing deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism (Gale and Shapley 1962, Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak and Roth 2005b)....
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...A school choice problem (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez 2003) is comprised of a number of students each of whom is to be assigned a seat at one of a number of schools....
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...Later, presented with theoretical analysis (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez 2003, Ergin and Sönmez 2006) and experimental evidence (Chen and Sönmez 2006) that one of the most popular school choice mechanisms, the Boston mechanism, is vulnerable to strategic manipulation and thus might not result in…...
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...…priority for a school may loose her priority advantage for that school if she does not list it as his first choice, the Boston mechanism forces students to make hard and risky strategic choices (see e.g., Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez 2003, Ergin and Sönmez 2006, Chen and Sönmez 2006, and He 2012)....
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TL;DR: The main focus of this paper is on determining the extent to which matching procedures can be designed which give agents the incentive to honestly reveal their preferences, and which produce stable matches.
Abstract: This paper considers some game-theoretic aspects of matching problems and procedures, of the sort which involve matching the members of one group of agents with one or more members of a second, disjoint group of agents, ail of whom have preferences over the possible resulting matches. The main focus of this paper is on determining the extent to which matching procedures can be designed which give agents the incentive to honestly reveal their preferences, and which produce stable matches. Two principal results are demonstrated. The first is that no matching procedure exists which always yields a stable outcome and gives players the incentive to reveal their true preferences, even though procedures exist which accomplish either of these goals separately. The second result is that matching procedures do exist, however, which always yield a stable outcome and which always give all the agents in one of the two disjoint sets of agents the incentive to reveal their true preferences.
908 citations
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Abstract: We discuss several issues regarding the organization of economic laboratory experiments such as subject pool, recruitment, scheduling, and show how we solved them with the help of the Online Recruitment System for Economic Experiments (ORSEE) version 2.0. With this integrated software experimenters have a free, convenient, and very powerful tool to organize their experiments and sessions in a standardized way. Key features are: PHP/MySQL application, multiple language/ laboratory/ subject pool/ experimenters/ experiment types/ experiment classes support, attribute query selection, random recruitment, experiment calendar, automated reputation system, automated invitation and rule based reminder mailing, subjects manage their own account, overview about registration state, user rights management, pdf output and mailing, complete logging and statistics, and customizable layout. In version 2.0 the software has been completely reprogrammed in PHP. Several new features have been added. A test system has been installed in order to visually support the reader while reading the manual (www.orsee.org).
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"From Boston to Chinese parallel to ..." refers background in this paper
...25Despite our explicit announcement in the advertisement that subjects should not participate in the school choice experiment more than once and our screening before each session, six subjects participated twice, which might be due to errors occurred in our database transition from ExLab to Orsee (Greiner 2004) in summer 2010....
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...…in the advertisement that subjects should not participate in the school choice experiment more than once and our screening before each session, six subjects participated twice, which might be due to errors occurred in our database transition from ExLab to Orsee (Greiner 2004) in summer 2010....
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