The Demise of Walk Zones in Boston: Priorities vs. Precedence in School Choice

Dur, Umut; Kominers, Scott Duke; Pathak, Parag A.; Sönmez, Tayfun

doi:10.3386/w18981

Cited by 26 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Echenique and Yenmez (2015) provide a characterization of strategy-proof mechanisms, which is similar to the ones by Westkamp (2013) and Kominers and Sönmez (2015). Dur, Kominers, Pathak, and Sönmez (2013) study how to control school priorities over sets of students and how to handle diversity constraints in the context of Boston school choice. Budish, Che, Kojima, and Milgrom (2010) develop a randomized mechanism which achieves a feasible assignment in expectation that satisfies type-specific ceilings.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Controlled School Choice with Soft Bounds and Overlapping Types

Kurata

Hamada

Iwasaki

et al. 2017

jair

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

School choice programs are implemented to give students/parents an opportunity to choose the public school the students attend. Controlled school choice programs need to provide choices for students/parents while maintaining distributional constraints on the composition of students, typically in terms of socioeconomic status. Previous works show that setting soft-bounds, which flexibly change the priorities of students based on their types, is more appropriate than setting hard-bounds, which strictly limit the number of accepted students for each type. We consider a case where soft-bounds are imposed and one student can belong to multiple types, e.g., "financially-distressed" and "minority" types. We first show that when we apply a model that is a straightforward extension of an existing model for disjoint types, there is a chance that no stable matching exists. Thus we propose an alternative model and an alternative stability definition, where a school has reserved seats for each type. We show that a stable matching is guaranteed to exist in this model and develop a mechanism called Deferred Acceptance for Overlapping Types (DA-OT). The DA-OT mechanism is strategy-proof and obtains the student-optimal matching within all stable matchings. Furthermore, we introduce an extended model that can handle both type-specific ceilings and floors and propose a extended mechanism DA-OT * to handle the extended model. Computer simulation results illustrate that DA-OT outperforms an artificial cap mechanism where we set a hard-bound for each type in each school. DA-OT * can achieve stability in the extended model without sacrificing students' welfare.

show abstract

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Controlled School Choice with Soft Bounds and Overlapping Types

Kurata

Hamada

Iwasaki

et al. 2017

jair

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The precedence order of priority classes matters in the allocation procedure, as shown by Dur et al (2013) by demonstrating that a simple priority scheme might be discriminating for some groups. For instance, let us assume there are five seats with siblings and distance priority and a further five seats with only distance priority.…”

Section: Particularities Of the 2016 Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It can be done by allocating the places for siblings first and then the remaining seats or in reverse. Dur et al (2013) showed that the reverse approach can benefit children with siblings, and Hafalir et al (2013) showed that reserving places for a certain minority results in a better allocation for the minority than limiting the quota for the majority does. Under the latter policy, both groups (minority and majority) could be worse off.…”

Section: Operationalisation Of Policy Designsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, the home address, application date, status of siblings and the child's birth date were collected. The allocation process was designed on the basis of the DA mechanism with slots (Dur et al, 2013) while policy transformation regarding fixing priorities was more complex. There were four types of priorities that are defined per position as follows, in the order of precedence: The positions are considered in order, with families first applying to the first position, then the second position, etc.…”

Section: Particularities Of the 2016 Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The way the distance and sibling factors are considered has already been studied in the literature (Dur et al, 2013). The particular solution chosen for the 2016 transitory system is an interesting rotation priority scheme, which can lead to a well-balanced solution with respect to the two factors.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Efficiency and fair access in Kindergarten allocation policy design

Veski¹,

Bíró²,

Põder³

et al. 2017

jMID

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We examine Kindergarten allocation practices in an Estonian municipality, Harku. Based on our recommendations, the allocation mechanism in Harku was redesigned in 2016. The new mechanism produces a child-optimal stable matching, with priorities primarily based on siblings and distance. We evaluate seven policy designs based on 2016 admission data in order to understand efficiency and fairness trade-offs. In addition to the descriptive data analysis, we conduct a counter-factual policy comparison and sensitivity analysis using computational experiments with generated preferences. We fix the allocation mechanism to be the child-oriented Deferred-Acceptance algorithm, but we vary how the priorities are created by altering sibling and distance factors. Different lotteries are included for breaking ties. We find that different ways of considering the same priority factors can have a significant aggregate effect on the allocation. Additionally, we survey a dozen special features that can create significant challenges (both theoretical and practical) in redesigning the

show abstract

Improving efficiency in school choice under partial priorities

Kitahara

Okumura²

2021

Int J Game Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Demise of Walk Zones in Boston: Priorities vs. Precedence in School Choice

Cited by 26 publications

References 39 publications

Controlled School Choice with Soft Bounds and Overlapping Types

Controlled School Choice with Soft Bounds and Overlapping Types

Efficiency and fair access in Kindergarten allocation policy design

Improving efficiency in school choice under partial priorities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About