The Boston mechanism is a popular student-placement mechanism in school-choice programs around the world. We provide two characterizations of the Boston mechanism. We introduce two new axioms; favoring higher ranks and rank-respecting invariance. A mechanism is the Boston mechanism for some...

The Boston mechanism is a popular student-placement mechanism in school-choice programs around the world. We provide two characterizations of the Boston mechanism. We introduce a new axiom, respect of preference rankings. A mechanism is the Boston mechanism for some priority if and only if it...

We study the effect of different centralized public school choice mechanisms on schools’ incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better off whenever that school...