Dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admissions rules in recent years. As the main motivation for these reforms, the policymakers cited the strategic flaws of the rules in place: students had incentives to game the system. However, after...

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...

Increasingly, more school districts across the US are using centralized admissions for charter, magnet, and neighborhood schools in a common enrollment system. We first show that, across all school-participation patterns, full participation in the common (or unified) enrollment system leads to...

Interdistrict school choice programs-where a student can be assigned to a school outside of her district-are widespread in the US, yet the market-design literature has not considered such programs. We introduce a model of interdistrict school choice and present two mechanisms that produce stable...

The Chicago Board of Education is implementing a centralized clearinghouse to assign students to schools for 2018-19 admissions. In this clearinghouse, each student can simultaneously be admitted to a selective and a nonselective school. We study this divided enrollment system and show that an...

Evidence suggests that participants in direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanisms (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. To explain the observed data, we introduce expectation-based loss aversion into a school-choice setting and characterize choice-acclimating personal equilibria in...

Evidence suggests that participants in direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanisms (DA) play dominated strategies. To explain the data, we introduce expectation-based loss aversion into a school-choice setting and characterize choice-acclimating personal equilibria in DA. We find...

A new mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others. We introduce a new framework for school-choice problems and two notions of fairness in lottery design based on ex-ante...

This study considers a school choice problem with general feasibility constraints. Each student belongs to a grade; and two students belonging to the same grade are symmetric, whereas those belonging to different grades can be asymmetric with respect to the feasibility constraint of a school. We...