In Search of Advice for Participants in Constrained School Choice

Abstract

School choice mechanisms are typically constrained, with students allowed to report preferences on a limited number of schools only Under constraints, the deferred acceptance mechanism (DA) is manipulable and it is unclear how students should play in DA. In order to provide advice to participants, we characterize the undominated strategies for the constrained versions of DA and the Boston mechanism (BOS).We show that domination alone allows to exclude more strategies in the constrained DA than in the constrained BOS.To provide additional advice to highly risk averse students, we also characterize undominated maximin strategies in the two mechanisms.We show that constrained DA is {safer} than constrained BOS in the sense that a student always prefers her maximin outcome in the former to her maximin outcome in the latter.

Keywords: School choice, Constraints, Undominated strategy, Maximin strategies, Boston mechanism, Deferred acceptance mechanism

JEL Classification: C78, D47, D82, I20