Experimental School Choice with Parents

2026-03-24

AI Summary

This study investigates the trade-offs among strategic behavior, efficiency, and stability in school choice mechanisms—specifically the strategy-proof Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism and two manipulable but potentially more efficient alternatives, Efficiency-Adjusted Deferred Acceptance (EADA) and the Rank-Minimizing (RM) mechanism—under real parental participation. Employing a laboratory experiment with actual parents as subjects, the research integrates mechanism design theory with behavioral methods to empirically compare these mechanisms. Findings reveal that strategic manipulation is prevalent across all mechanisms; while DA does not induce truthful reporting, such manipulation yields no gains and produces stable outcomes. RM substantially improves efficiency at the cost of stability, whereas EADA exhibits intermediate performance, though not statistically significant. The study further validates the external validity of prior student-based experiments and demonstrates the influence of cognitive ability on strategic behavior and matching outcomes.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Machine Learning: Learning Preferences or Rankings

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

We conduct the first laboratory school choice experiment in which parents-the relevant decision makers in the field-are the experimental subjects. We compare Deferred Acceptance (DA) with two manipulable but potentially more efficient alternatives: Efficiency-Adjusted Deferred Acceptance (EADA) and the Rank-Minimizing mechanism (RM). We find that all mechanisms are frequently manipulated, with no significant differences in truth-telling rates. Parents and students manipulate at similar rates, supporting the external validity of student-based experiments, though students make significantly more obvious errors, suggesting parents' deviations are more deliberate. Despite widespread manipulation, the predicted welfare-stability tradeoff largely survives: DA never produces Pareto-efficient allocations yet generates little justified envy; whereas RM delivers substantial efficiency gains at a meaningful stability cost. EADA occupies a middle ground: its efficiency gains over DA are modest and imprecisely estimated yet double justified envy. Higher cognitive ability is associated with more deviations, and under EADA with worse outcomes. While DA does not induce truth-telling, it is the only mechanism in which manipulation never pays off and rarely changes outcomes.

Problem

• school choice
• mechanism manipulation
• efficiency-stability tradeoff
• parental decision-making
• matching mechanisms

Innovation

• school choice
• Deferred Acceptance
• mechanism design
• behavioral experiment
• parental decision-making