From Boston to Shanghai to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on a Family of School Choice Mechanisms
نویسندگان
چکیده
We characterize a family of proposal-refusal school choice mechanisms, including the Boston, Shanghai, and Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanisms as special cases. Moving from one extreme member towards the other results in a systematic change in the incentive properties and nested Nash equilibria. In the laboratory, the proportion of truth-telling follows DA > Shanghai > Boston. While DA is significantly more stable than Shanghai or Boston, the efficiency comparison varies across environments. In our 4-school environment, DA is weakly more efficient than Boston. However, in our 6-school environment, Boston achieves significantly higher efficiency than Shanghai, which outperforms DA.
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