Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the transition would lead to efficiency gains. The first two mechanisms are strategy-proof, but in practice student assignment procedures typically impede a student to submit a preference list that contains all his acceptable schools. We study the preference revelation game where students can only declare up to a fixed number of schools to be acceptable. We focus on the stability and efficiency of the Nash equilibrium outcomes. Our main results identify rather stringent necessary and sufficient conditions on the priorities to guarantee stability or efficiency of either of the two mechanisms. This stands in sharp contrast with the Boston mechanism which has been abandoned in many US school districts but nevertheless yields stable Nash equilibrium outcomes.
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Volume (Year): 144 (2009) Issue (Month): 5 (September) Pages: 1921-1947 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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Guillaume Haeringer & Flip Klijn, 2006.
"Constrained School Choice,"
UFAE and IAE Working Papers
671.06, Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC), revised 02 Dec 2008.
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Lars Ehlers & Bettina Klaus, 2002.
"Efficient Priority Rules,"
UFAE and IAE Working Papers
554.02, Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC).
[Downloadable!]
EHLERS, Lars & KLAUS, Bettina, 2003.
"Efficient Priority Rules,"
Cahiers de recherche
11-2003, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
[Downloadable!]
EHLERS, Lars & KLAUS, Bettina, 2005.
"Consistent House Allocation,"
Cahiers de recherche
2005-08, Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques.
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Other versions:
Ehlers,Lars & Klaus,Bettina, 2005.
"Consistent House Allocation,"
Research Memoranda
007, Maastricht : METEOR, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization.
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