Comparing school choice and college admissions mechanisms by their strategic accessibility

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bonkoungou, Somouaoga; Nesterov, Alexander
• 署名单位: University of Lausanne; HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics); HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
• 刊物名称: THEORETICAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1933-6837
• DOI: 10.3982/TE4137
• 发表日期: 2021-07-01
• 页码: 881-909
• 关键词: Market design; school choice; manipulability

摘要

Dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admissions rules in recent years. As the main motivation for these reforms, the policymakers cited the strategic flaws of the rules in place: students had incentives to game the system. However, after the reforms, almost none of the new rules became strategy-proof. We explain this puzzle. We show that the rules used after the reforms are less prone to gaming according to a criterion called strategic accessibility: each reformexpands the set of schools wherein each student can never get admission by manipulation. We also show that the existing explanation of the puzzle due to Pathak and Sonmez (2013) is incomplete.