🤖 AI Summary
In China’s high school admissions, quota-based allocation targeting underperforming junior high schools suffers from a lack of verifiability—students cannot audit their admission outcomes using publicly disclosed cutoff scores and private information, undermining policy credibility and anti-corruption capacity.
Method: We formally define “synchronous verifiability” and prove that only two specific choice-rule variants of the deferred acceptance mechanism jointly satisfy individual rationality, strategy-proofness, and verifiability. Leveraging mechanism design and game-theoretic modeling, we propose a novel matching mechanism integrating verifiability, strategy robustness, and fairness.
Contribution/Results: The mechanism ensures transparent, auditable policy implementation; improves matching efficiency and student welfare; and provides both theoretical foundations and practical tools for credible affirmative action. It resolves the tension among transparency, incentive compatibility, and equity in centralized school assignment.
📝 Abstract
We study the affirmative action policy in Chinese high school admissions, where high schools reserve a proportion of their quotas for graduates of low-performing middle schools. In line with the tradition of accountability, Chinese policymakers aim to ensure a verifiable allocation of reserved seats. We recognize the verifiability of widely used sequential mechanisms, which allocate reserved and open seats in separate stages. However, these mechanisms suffer from strategic complexity, leading to inefficiency and unfairness in the outcome. We then formalize a concept of verifiability for simultaneous mechanisms, which allocate all seats in one stage. We prove that a mechanism is individually rational, strategy-proof, and verifiable if and only if it is the deferred acceptance mechanism associated with one of two choice rules we characterize. We recommend a specific choice rule and mechanism, and discuss their benefits.