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When Does an Additional Stage Improve Welfare in Centralized Assignment?

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  • Battal Doğan
  • M. Bumin Yenmez

Abstract

We study multistage centralized assignments to allocate scarce resources based on priorities in the context of school choice. We characterize the capacity-priority profiles of schools under which an additional stage of assignment may improve student welfare when the deferred acceptance algorithm is used at each stage. If the capacity-priority profile is acyclic, then no student prefers any subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) outcome of the 2-stage enrollment system to the truthful equilibrium outcome of the 1-stage enrolment system. If the capacity-priority profile is not acyclic, then an SPNE outcome of the 2-stage enrollment system may Pareto dominate the truthful equilibrium outcome of the 1-stage enrollment system.

Suggested Citation

  • Battal Doğan & M. Bumin Yenmez, 2018. "When Does an Additional Stage Improve Welfare in Centralized Assignment?," Bristol Economics Discussion Papers 18/704, School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK.
  • Handle: RePEc:bri:uobdis:18/704
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    Cited by:

    1. Turhan, Bertan, 2019. "Welfare and incentives in partitioned school choice markets," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 199-208.
    2. Haeringer, Guillaume & Iehlé, Vincent, 2021. "Gradual college admission," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    3. Tommy Andersson & Umut Dur & Sinan Ertemel & Onur Kesten, 2024. "Sequential school choice with public and private schools," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 63(2), pages 231-276, September.
    4. Tetsutaro Hatakeyama, 2025. "When is a sequential school choice system (non-)deficient?," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 29(2), pages 301-312, June.
    5. Doval, Laura, 2022. "Dynamically stable matching," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 17(2), May.
    6. Jiarui Xie, 2024. "Games under the Tiered Deferred Acceptance Mechanism," Papers 2406.00455, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    7. Vincent Iehlé, 2016. "Gradual College Admisssion," Post-Print halshs-02367006, HAL.
    8. Doğan, Battal & Yenmez, M. Bumin, 2019. "Unified versus divided enrollment in school choice: Improving student welfare in Chicago," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 366-373.
    9. Manocha, Kriti & Turhan, Bertan, 2025. "Gradual matching with affirmative action," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 153(C), pages 164-178.
    10. repec:hhs:lunewp:2023_012 is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson, 2022. "School Choice," NBER Working Papers 29822, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

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