Mechanism Performance Under Strategy Advice and Sub-Optimal Play: A School Choice Experiment
57 Pages Posted: 1 Jan 2020
Date Written: December 11, 2019
Abstract
We implement a laboratory experiment to study how strategy advice affects participants' decisions in a school choice game. In the strategy-proof Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism, strategy advice prompts more participants to choose the dominant strategy of truth-telling. In the Immediate Acceptance (IA) mechanism, strategy advice to implement one of two heuristic strategies that are widely recommended in the field induces participants to choose one of those strategies. We then use our data to perform exploratory analyses on how the variation in the proportion of participants who choose sub-optimal strategies affects mechanism performance.
Keywords: school choice, experiment, strategy advice, mechanism design, sub-optimal play
JEL Classification: C78, C92, D82
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation