How should students be assigned to schools? Two mechanisms have been suggested and implemented around the world: deferred acceptance (DA) and top trading cycles (TTC). These two mechanisms are widely considered excellent choices owing to their outstanding stability and incentive properties. We...

Education reforms must go furtherIncentivising Excellence considers the conditions that need to prevail for school choice to fulfil its promise in relation to improving educational outcomes. It contends that without attention to system design and supporting reforms geared to fundamentally...

We compare the manipulability of school choice mechanisms based on the occurrence of dominant strategies. We characterize dominant strategies in the constrained versions of the deferred acceptance (DA) and Boston (BOS) mechanisms. We leverage our characterizations to show that dominant...

We present a model in which students can influence their priority in a school choice mechanism through a first-stage costly effort game. We show that efficiency improvements to the mechanism can lead to net efficiency losses if they come at the price of increased allocative inequalities, which...

We consider a school choice matching model where priorities for schools are represented by binary relations that may not be total orders. Even in that case, it is necessary to construct total orders from the priority relations to execute several mechanisms. We focus on the extensions of the...

How should students be assigned to schools? Two mechanisms have been suggested and implemented around the world: deferred acceptance (DA) and top trading cycles (TTC). These two mechanisms are widely considered excellent choices because they are strategy-proof, in addition to DA’s no justified...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these...