题  目： Gaming the Boston School Choice Mechanism in Beijing

报告人： Yinghua He    Toulouse School of Economics 

主持人：朱希伟

时  间：2012年3月2日   星期五   15:00-16:30

地  点：浙大玉泉校区外经贸大楼418室

欢迎广大师生参加！

CRPE秘书处
2012-2-27

Abstract:

Many public school choice programs use centralized mechanisms to match students with schools in the absence of market-clearing prices. Among them, the Boston mechanism is one of the most widely used. It is well-known that truth-telling may not be optimal under the Boston mechanism, which raises the concern that the mechanism may create a disadvantage to parents who do not strategize or do not strategize well. Using a data set from Beijing, this paper investigates parents' strategic behaviors under the Boston mechanism and its welfare implications. School choice is modeled as a simultaneous game with parents' preferences being private information. The paper derives restrictions on parents' behavior under various assumptions on their sophistication, or ability to predict others' behavior, and the model is estimated using simulated maximum likelihood. The results suggest that parents' sophistication is heterogeneous; when parents have a greater incentive to behave strategically, they pay more attention to uncertainty and strategize better. There is also evidence, although not robust, that wealthier and/or more educated parents strategize worse. If the Boston mechanism is replaced by the Deferred-Acceptance mechanism under which truth-telling is always optimal, the majority of the sophisticated parents who always play a best response are worse off. The reform benefits half of the naive parents who are always truth-telling under the Boston mechanism, while it also hurts about 20% of them.