The design of the New York City (NYC) high school match involved trade-offs among efficiency, stability, and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences -- ties -- in school preferences. Simulations with field data and the theory favor breaking...

Despite its widespread use, the Boston mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances compared to the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm (DA). By contrast, when students have the same ordinal preferences and schools have no priorities, we find that the...

A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appeals by unsatisfied parents. We formulate...

Empirical and experimental evidence suggests different levels of sophistication among families in the Boston Public School student assignment plan. We analyze the preference revelation game induced by the Boston mechanism with sincere players who report their true preferences and sophisticated...

A number of labor markets and student placement systems can be modeled as many-to-one matching markets. We analyze the scope for manipulation in many-to-one matching markets under the student-optimal stable mechanism when the number of participants is large. Under some regularity conditions, we...

In Fall 2009, Chicago authorities abandoned a school assignment mechanism midstream, citing concerns about its vulnerability to manipulation. Nonetheless, they asked thousands of applicants to re-rank schools in a new mechanism that is also manipulable. This paper introduces a method to compare...