IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rjapxx/v29y2024i1p362-385.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Can the university matching mechanism in Malaysia do better? An experimental evaluation of three matching mechanisms

Author

Listed:
  • Ooi Tze Wei
  • Ch’ng Kean-Siang
  • Suresh Narayanan

Abstract

In Malaysia, the Immediate Acceptance Mechanism (IAM) is used to match the preferences of eligible students to the limited places available in public universities every year. Preference manipulation by students often results in places being offered to less academically qualified applicants over their better-qualified counterparts. We conducted laboratory experiments to evaluate the performance of IAM with two other popular mechanisms for centralized college admissions: the deferred acceptance mechanism (DAM), and the top trading cycle mechanism (TTC). In doing so, we broadened existing research by incorporating two features. First, we assumed a competitive environment with excess demand for college seats, as is the case in Malaysia. Second, we examined the impact of offering different amounts of information varying from just the stated minimum entry requirements (as is the current practice in Malaysia) to giving additional information on the number of seats available and the past average grades used to admit students in each university. Incorporating excess demand departs from the existing literature that has explored only examples where the student-seat ratio is 1:1, or very close to it. Our results suggest that in the prevailing Malaysian situation the DAM will perform better than the IAM because students are likely to express their true preferences which also increases its matching stability. However, if the availability of places in private universities results in a less congested market, either the DAM or TTC will perform better-provided students are given information on the number of places available and the minimum entry requirements of each university.

Suggested Citation

  • Ooi Tze Wei & Ch’ng Kean-Siang & Suresh Narayanan, 2024. "Can the university matching mechanism in Malaysia do better? An experimental evaluation of three matching mechanisms," Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(1), pages 362-385, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:rjapxx:v:29:y:2024:i:1:p:362-385
    DOI: 10.1080/13547860.2021.2024364
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13547860.2021.2024364
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13547860.2021.2024364?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rjapxx:v:29:y:2024:i:1:p:362-385. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rjap .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.