Sequential school choice: Theory and evidence from the field and lab

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dur, Umut; Hammond, Robert G.; Kesten, Onur
• 署名单位: North Carolina State University; University of Alabama System; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa; University of Sydney
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105344
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: School choice; School assignment; matching theory; Sequential-move games

摘要

We analyze sequential preference submission in centralized matching problems. Our motivation comes from school districts and colleges that use an application website where students submit their preferences over schools sequentially, after learning information about previous submissions. Comparing the widely used Boston Mechanism (BM) to the celebrated Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism, we show that a sequential implementation of BM can achieve superior equilibrium outcomes relative to the student optimal stable matching. Our empirical tests use data from the field and from a laboratory experiment. We find that sequential preference submission may allow students to overcome the coordination problem in school choice. Our findings may have important policy implications in numerous places across the world where BM is currently in use. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.