Improving Transparency in School Admissions: Theory and Experiment

70 Pages Posted: 5 May 2020 Last revised: 12 Jul 2022

See all articles by Rustamdjan Hakimov

Rustamdjan Hakimov

University of Lausanne ; WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Madhav Raghavan

Department of Economics, University of Lausanne

Date Written: March 31, 2022

Abstract

Students participating in centralised admissions procedures do not typically have access to the information used to determine their matched school, such as other students’ preferences or school priorities. This can lead to doubts about whether their matched schools were computed correctly (the ‘Verifiability Problem’) or, at a deeper level, whether the promised admissions procedure was even used (the ‘Transparency Problem’). In a general centralised admissions model that spans many popular applications, we show how these problems can be addressed by providing appropriate feedback to students, even without disclosing sensitive private information like other students’ preferences or school priorities. In particular, we show that the Verifiability Problem can be solved by (1) publicly communicating the minimum scores required to be matched to a school (‘cutoffs’); or (2) using ‘predictable’ preference elicitation procedures that convey rich ‘experiential’ information. In our main result, we show that the Transparency Problem can be solved by using cutoffs and predictable procedures together. We find strong support for these solutions in a laboratory experiment, and show how they can be simply implemented for popular school admissions applications involving top trading cycles, and deferred and immediate acceptance.

Keywords: Mechanism design, information, designer incentive-compatibility, dynamic mechanisms, cutoffs, school admissions experiment

JEL Classification: C78, C73, D78, D82

Suggested Citation

Hakimov, Rustamdjan and Hakimov, Rustamdjan and Raghavan, Madhav, Improving Transparency in School Admissions: Theory and Experiment (March 31, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3572020 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3572020

Rustamdjan Hakimov

University of Lausanne ( email )

Quartier Chambronne
Lausanne, 1016
Switzerland

WZB Berlin Social Science Center ( email )

Reichpietschufer 50
D-10785 Berlin, 10785
Germany

Madhav Raghavan (Contact Author)

Department of Economics, University of Lausanne ( email )

Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne
Lausanne, Vaud CH-1015
Switzerland

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