The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange Improves Its Matching Process

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers representing children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE's operational challenges using case worker surveys and a regression analysis of data on child outcomes over multiple years. Using a discrete-event simulation of PAE, we justify the value of a statewide adoption network and demonstrate the importance of the family preference information quality on the percentage of children who successfully nd adoptive placements. Finally, we detail a series of simple improvements implemented by PAE to increase the adoptive placement rate through collecting more valuable information, improving the family ranking algorithm, and aligning incentives for families to provide useful preference information.