We study a college admissions problem in which colleges accept students by ranking students’ efforts in entrance exams. Students’ ability levels affect the cost of their efforts. We solve and compare the equilibria of “centralized college admissions” (CCA) where students apply to all...

We study a college admissions problem in which colleges accept students by ranking students' efforts in entrance exams. Students' ability levels affect the cost of their efforts. We solve and compare equilibria of "centralized college admissions" (CCA) where students apply to all colleges and...

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

We theoretically and experimentally study a college admissions problem in which colleges accept students by ranking students' efforts in entrance exams. Students hold private information regarding their ability level that affects the cost of their efforts. We assume that student preferences are...

In 2012 Brazilian public universities were mandated to use affirmative action policies for candidates from racial and income minorities. We show that the policy makes the students' affirmative action status a strategic choice, and may reject high-achieving minority students while admitting...

Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these reforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had strong incentives to game the system, which caused dramatic...

We develop a method to measure the fairness of school matching mechanisms and apply it to the Boston mechanism used in the Chinese college admissions system. Fairness is measured by mismatch, or the gap between the actual and fair matching outcomes. An individual's mismatch is then related to...

The paper analyzes the scope for manipulation in many-to-one matching markets (college admission problems) under the student-optimal stable mechanism when the number of participants is large and the length of the preference list is bounded. Under a mild independence assumption on the...

I propose a centralized clearinghouse for college admissions in which students can signal enthusiasm by commitment, as in early-decision programs. Furthermore, students can specify financial aid in their preferences and they can be matched with multiple colleges simultaneously. This...