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Assignment feedback in school choice mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Daniel Stephenson Open the ORCID record for Daniel Stephenson [Opens in a new window]
Daniel Stephenson*
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA
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[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper experimentally investigates the provision of real-time feedback about school assignments during the preference reporting period in three widely employed mechanisms: deferred acceptance, top trading cycles, and the Boston mechanism. Adaptive models predict that greater sensitivity to tentative assignments during the reporting period will produce more equilibrium assignments in all three mechanisms. Consistent with adaptive predictions, real-time assignment feedback consistently increased equilibrium assignments but did not increase truthful reporting. These findings suggest that providing feedback about assignments during the preference reporting period could help student assignment mechanisms more reliably achieve policy goals.

Keywords

School choiceMechanism designAdaptive modelsFeedbackLearningD82C73C92D83
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 25 , Issue 5 , December 2022 , pp. 1467 - 1491
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Economic Science Association 2022.

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Footnotes

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-022-09767-6.

Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

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