2020/01/17 by Bonkoungou, Somouaoga, Nesterov, Alexander S.
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Economics and business #Game Theory and Voting Systems #General Economics (econ.GN) #School Choice and Performance #Theoretical Economics (econ.TH)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2001.06166
openalex publication_date 2020/01/17 · openalex created_date 2021/02/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the\nworld have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these\nreforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had\nstrong incentives to game the system, which caused dramatic consequences for\nnon-strategic students. However, almost none of the new rules were\nstrategy-proof. We explain this puzzle. We show that after the reforms the\nrules became more immune to strategic admissions: each student received a\nsmaller set of schools that he can get in using a strategy, weakening\nincentives to manipulate. Simultaneously, the admission to each school became\nstrategy-proof to a larger set of students, making the schools more available\nfor non-strategic students. We also show that the existing explanation of the\npuzzle due to Pathak and S "onmez (2013) is incomplete.\n