College Admissions Game: Early Action or Early Decision?

In this paper, we study the long-played, yet until now unmodeled, college admissions game over early admissions plans using a many-to-one matching framework. We characterize the equilibrium strategies of each college involving its early quota out of its total capacity, and the set of admissible and deferred students within its applicant pool independently from the early admissions plans of the colleges in the market. Given these strategies, we show that for each college early action is a weakly dominant choice between early admissions plans.