• DOI:10.2139/ssrn.3526194
• Corpus ID: 210713819

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

@article{Bonkoungou2020ComparingSC,
  title={Comparing School Choice and College Admission Mechanisms By Their Immunity to Strategic Admissions},
  author={Somouaoga Bonkoungou and Alexander S. Nesterov},
  journal={Sociology of Education eJournal},
  year={2020}
}

• Somouaoga Bonkoungou, Alexander S. Nesterov
• Published 17 January 2020
• Education
• Sociology of Education eJournal

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.