Affiliation:
1. Bates White Economic Consulting Washington District of Columbia USA
2. Department of Economics, Finance, and Legal Studies University of Alabama Tuscaloosa Alabama USA
Abstract
AbstractDesigning the markets that allocate public school seats is a crucial policy consideration. This paper compares the design of school choice mechanisms in terms of economic efficiency, stability, and strategic behavior. We estimate demand for schools using data from a large US public school system with novel indicators of students' levels of strategic sophistication. We find important benefits of reserving a set of seats to be assigned by a pure lottery. In settings that share features in common with the school system we study, our findings suggest that non‐selective criteria such as lotteries induce a large increase in truth‐telling.
Subject
Economics and Econometrics,General Business, Management and Accounting