Improving Transparency and Verifiability in School Admissions: Theory and Experiment

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Hakimov, Rustamdjan; Raghavan, Madhav
• 署名单位: University of Lausanne
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2023.00105
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: School choice; matching; TRANSPARENCY; cutoffs; multi-stage mechanisms; experiment

摘要

Students participating in centralized admissions procedures do not typically have access to the information used to determine their matched school, such as other students' preferences or school priorities. This can lead to doubts about whether their matches were computed correctly (the verifiability problem) or, at a deeper level, whether the promised admissions procedure was even used (the transparency problem). In a model that spans many popular applications, we show how these problems can be addressed by providing appropriate feedback to students without disclosing sensitive information like other students' preferences or school priorities. In particular, we show that the verifiability problem can be solved by (1) publicly communicating cutoffs (the minimum scores required to be eligible for each school) or (2) using single-school preference elicitation procedures that convey rich experiential information. In our main result, we show that the transparency problem can be solved by using cutoffs and single-school elicitation procedures together. We find strong support for these solutions in a laboratory experiment and show how they can be implemented for popular school admissions applications involving top trading cycles, and deferred and immediate acceptance.