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arXiv · 2001.06166

Comparing School Choice and College Admission Mechanisms By Their Immunity to Strategic Admissions

Somouaoga Bonkoungou·Alexander S. Nesterov
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Abstract

Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these reforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had strong incentives to game the system, which caused dramatic consequences for non-strategic students. However, almost none of the new rules were strategy-proof. We explain this puzzle. We show that after the reforms the rules became more immune to strategic admissions: each student received a smaller set of schools that he can get in using a strategy, weakening incentives to manipulate. Simultaneously, the admission to each school became strategy-proof to a larger set of students, making the schools more available for non-strategic students. We also show that the existing explanation of the puzzle due to Pathak and S\"onmez (2013) is incomplete.

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Somouaoga Bonkoungou, Alexander S. Nesterov. 2020-01-17. Comparing School Choice and College Admission Mechanisms By Their Immunity to Strategic Admissions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.06166

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