Working Paper: NBER ID: w14618
Authors: Clayton Featherstone; Muriel Niederle
Abstract: Criteria for evaluating school choice mechanisms are first, whether truth-telling is sometimes punished and second, how efficient the match is. With common knowledge preferences, Deferred Acceptance (DA) dominates the Boston mechanism by the first criterion and is ambiguously ranked by the second. Our laboratory experiments confirm this. A new ex ante perspective, where preferences are private information, introduces new efficiency costs borne by strategy-proof mechanisms, like DA. In a symmetric environment, truth-telling can be an equilibrium under Boston, and Boston can first-order stochastically dominate DA in terms of efficiency, both in theory and in the laboratory.
Keywords: school choice; mechanisms; experimental investigation; efficiency; deferred acceptance; Boston mechanism
JEL Codes: C78; C9; I2
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Boston mechanism (in symmetric environment) (C72) | truthtelling can be an equilibrium (C62) |
| Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism (C78) | students benefit from truthfully revealing their preferences (C78) |
| Boston mechanism (Y60) | students do not report their preferences truthfully (C92) |
| Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism (C78) | stable and efficient outcomes (C62) |
| Boston mechanism (Y60) | less efficient matching outcomes (C78) |
| Boston mechanism (Y60) | first-choice allocations (D61) |
| Boston mechanism (Y60) | students may be better off (D29) |