Minimal-Access Rights in School Choice and the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism

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Serval ID
serval:BIB_37355F3E306F
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
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Publications
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Title
Minimal-Access Rights in School Choice and the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism
Journal
Mathematics of Operations Research
Author(s)
Bettina Klaus, Flip Klijn
Publication state
Published
Issued date
25/08/2023
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Language
english
Abstract
A classical school choice problem consists of a set of schools with priorities over students and a set of students with preferences over schools. Schools’ priorities are often based on multiple criteria, for example, merit-based test scores as well as minimal-access rights (siblings attending the school, students’ proximity to the school, etc.). Traditionally, minimal-access rights are incorporated into priorities by always giving minimal-access stu-dents higher priority over non-minimal-access students. However, stability based on such adjusted priorities can be considered unfair because a minimal-access student may be admitted to a popular school, whereas another student with a higher merit score but with-out a minimal-access right is rejected, even though the former minimal-access student could easily attend another of her minimal-access schools. We therefore weaken stability to minimal-access stability: minimal-access rights promote access to only at most one minimal-access school. Apart from minimal-access stability, we also would want a school choice mechanism to satisfy strategy-proofness and minimal-access monotonicity, that is, additional minimal-access rights for a student do not harm her. Our main result is that the deferred acceptance mechanism is the only mechanism that satisfies minimal-access stabil-ity, strategy-proofness, and minimal-access monotonicity. Because this mechanism is in fact stable, our result can be interpreted as an impossibility result: fairer outcomes that are made possible by the weaker property of minimal-access stability are incompatible with strategy-proofness and minimal-access monotonicity.
Funding(s)
Swiss National Science Foundation / Projects / 100018_192583
Create date
15/02/2024 10:46
Last modification date
17/02/2024 8:16
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