The Skipping-down strategy and stability in school choice problems with affirmative action: Theory and experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kawagoe, Toshiji; Matsubae, Taisuke; Takizawa, Hirokazu
• 署名单位: Future University Hakodate; Chuo University; Chuo University
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2017.12.012
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 212-239
• 关键词: School choice; Truth-telling; affirmative action; market design; experiment

摘要

This paper presents a theoretical and experimental study of affirmative action policies in school choice problems focusing on the minority reserve mechanism, or DA-Reserve, proposed by Hafalir et al. (2013) and the majority quota mechanism, or DA-Quota, proposed by Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003), Kojima (2012) and Matsubae (2011). An evaluation of the performance of these mechanisms showed that, (1) while truth-telling is a dominant strategy in both mechanisms, the rate of its occurrence was less than 60%; (2) the average payoff was significantly higher with DA-Reserve than with DA-Quota, as theoretically predicted; (3) surprisingly, the proportion of students exhibiting justified envy was higher with DA-Reserve than with DA-Quota; and (4) a systematic pattern of deviation from the dominant strategy (referred to as skipping-down) was observed, and it was theoretically proven that this constituted Nash equilibrium with DA-Quota in some environments but not with DA-Reserve. More generally, the set of stable matchings was found to be larger with DA-Quota than with DA-Reserve, which explains the matching instability observed with the latter. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.