What you don't know can help you in school assignment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dur, Umut Mert; Morrill, Thayer
• 署名单位: North Carolina State University
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2018.10.014
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 246-256
• 关键词: School assignment; deferred acceptance; Marked design; Nash equilibrium

摘要

No strategy-proof mechanism Pareto dominates the student-proposing Deferred Acceptance mechanism (hereafter DA). However, it is unknown if a mechanism can Pareto dominate DA in equilibrium. We demonstrate a surprising result: a market designer can do better by learning less about students' preferences when making a school assignment. Specifically, we demonstrate that running DA but limiting students to only two applications always has an equilibrium (in weakly undominated, pure strategies) that Pareto dominates DA. We also show that no mechanism that Pareto improves DA with respect to submitted preferences actually Pareto improves DA in equilibrium. Therefore, such a mechanism may not improve DA in practice. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.