School Choice with Asymmetric Information: Priority Design and the Curse of Acceptance

Kloosterman, Andrew; Troyan, Peter

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3094384

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…If not deliberate, the variation in admission-consciousness, and in admission welfare outcomes, may be explained by information differentials between demographic groups (Bonal et al, 2017;Kloosterman and Troyan, 2018). That is, white, non-poor parents may be better at accurately assessing admission probabilities to oversubscribed schools.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of strategic reports and subjective admission beliefs in explaining the ‘ethnic admissions gap’ in English secondary schools

Weldon¹

2019

Preprint

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Data from the English secondary school admissions cycle reveals a substantial ethnic gap in the proportion accessing their chosen schools. Children from minority ethnic groups are, on average, 17% less likely to be admitted into their top-ranked secondary school, compared to white children. This gap is large even after controlling for socio-economic status and prior attainment. However, constraints on the length of preference lists mean that stated preferences may not be truthful, as parents may have incentives to strategise by excluding preferred schools. By accounting for strategic stated preferences and biased beliefs about chances of admission, this paper recovers parametric estimates of preference parameters and the degree of strategic selection. To examine the relative contribution of geographic sorting, strategies, and market design (mechanism and admission rules), the corrected revealed preference estimates are used to estimate expected welfare under three scenarios. The analysis reveals that both underlying preferences and strategising behaviour exhibit substantial heterogeneity by ethnicity, income and ability. When comparing welfare, I find that differences in admissions priority between white and minority ethnic families create small but significant and consistent differences in welfare. However, larger welfare differences are due to differences in preferences and strategy between the two groups.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of strategic reports and subjective admission beliefs in explaining the ‘ethnic admissions gap’ in English secondary schools

Weldon¹

2019

Preprint

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“…Rastegari et al (2013) study matching under partially ordered preferences, Aziz et al (2020) assume a known distribution of preference profiles, and in Immorlica et al (2020); Liu et al (2020) additional information can be acquired. Some models, e.g., in Liu et al (2014), Kloosterman andTroyan (2020), andLiu (2020), suppose that information is partial only for one side (colleges or students). Finally, Chakraborty et al (2010) and Bikhchandani (2017) show that a matching based on incomplete information can be stable if agents do not know to the full matching.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical Discrimination in Stable Matchings

Castera

Loiseau

Pradelski

2022

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

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Statistical discrimination results when a decision-maker observes an imperfect estimate of the quality of each candidate dependent on which demographic group they belong to. Prior literature is limited to simple selection problems with a single decision-maker. In this paper, we initiate the study of statistical discrimination in matching, where multiple decision-makers are simultaneously facing selection problems from the same pool of candidates (e.g., colleges admitting students). We propose a model where two colleges observe noisy estimates of each candidate's quality. The estimation noise controls a new key feature of the problem, namely the correlation between the estimates of the two colleges: if the noise is high, the correlation is low and vice-versa. We consider stable matchings in an infinite population of students. We show that a lower correlation (i.e., higher estimation noise) for one of the groups worsens the outcome for all groups. Further, the probability that a candidate is assigned to their first choice is independent of their group. In contrast, the probability that a candidate is assigned to a college at all depends on their group, revealing the presence of discrimination coming from the correlation effect alone. Somewhat counter-intuitively the group that is subjected to more noise is better off.

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“…Serial dictatorship lets agents with higher information costs choose early, incentivizing more information acquisition and improving efficiency. Harless and Manjunath (2018) considers a student's choice of which school to learn about, and Kloosterman and Troyan (2018) considers each student's learning about others' preferences.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Preference Learning in School Choice Problems

Bodoh-Creed¹,

Lee²

2022

Preprint

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Many school districts in the U.S. have replaced the Boston mechanism with deferred acceptance (DA) due to manipulability and unfairness. Nonetheless, the Boston mechanism Pareto dominates the DA in ex-ante welfare, especially when students have similar ordinal preferences and schools have coarse priorities. We show that the DA's inefficiency relative to the Boston worsens if students have to acquire information about preferences at a cost before submitting rank-order lists to a given mechanism. Under the DA, greater homogeneity in rank-order reports and less information acquisition reinforce each other. A higher information cost intensifies this reinforcement and exacerbates the DA's inefficiency. * We thank Yuichi Imai for excellent research assistance and Mariagiovanna Baccara, Anqi Li, Leeat Yariv, and seminar participants for valuable comments.

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School Choice with Asymmetric Information: Priority Design and the Curse of Acceptance

Cited by 4 publications

References 35 publications

The role of strategic reports and subjective admission beliefs in explaining the ‘ethnic admissions gap’ in English secondary schools

The role of strategic reports and subjective admission beliefs in explaining the ‘ethnic admissions gap’ in English secondary schools

Statistical Discrimination in Stable Matchings

Preference Learning in School Choice Problems

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