School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students’ educational outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used...

School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students' educational outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used...

School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students’ educa-tional outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used...

The Boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world. To resolve overdemands, priority is often given to families who live in the neighborhood school. We note that such priorities define some schools as being safer. We exploit an unexpected change in the...

An important debate centers on what procedure should be used to allocate students across public schools. We contribute to this debate by developing and estimating a model of school choices by households under one of the most popular procedures known as the Boston mechanism (BM). We recover the...

Recent work has highlighted welfare gains from the use of the Boston mechanism over deferred acceptance (DA) in school choice problems, in particular finding that when cardinal utility is taken into account, Boston interim Pareto dominates DA in certain incomplete information environments with...

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects incentives are drastically...

Many school districts in the U.S. use a student assignment mechanism that we refer to as the Boston mechanism. Under this mechanism a student loses his priority at a school unless his parents rank it as their first choice. Therefore parents are given incentives to rank high on their list the...

A double auction game with an infinite number of buyers and sellers is introduced. All sellers posses one unit of a good, all buyers desire to buy one unit. Each seller and each buyer has a private valuation of the good. The distribution of the valuations define supply and demand functions. One...