Cognitive ability and games of school choice

Transparency and Fairness in School Choice Mechanisms

“…In line with previous ndings (Basteck and Mantovani 2018), cognitive abilities should be correlated with strategic abilities and facilitate individually optimal choices regardless of the procedural rules.…”

“…4 One potential explanation is that knowing the rules may not be the same as understanding the rules. On the one hand, cognitive abilities are likely to determine whether students adopt an adequate strategy (see Basteck and Mantovani 2018). On the other hand, it is far from clear whether the fairness of a mechanism should be assessed based on its allocative or incentive properties (Kamada and Kojima 2019) rather than on its transparency.…”

“…Finally, there is some evidence that the outcome of a matching mechanism depends on risk preferences and personality traits. For example, Klijn, Pais, and Vorsatz (2013) nd evidence that, under the GS mechanism, truth-telling drops as risk aversion increases, while Basteck and Mantovani (2018) show that students with lower cognitive abilities fail to strategize well under the BOS mechanism, which entails lower payos and over-representation at low-ranked schools. This article contributes to this literature by showing that the relevance of cognitive abilities depends on the complexity of the strategy required to achieve an individually optimal outcome.…”

Protecting unsophisticated applicants in school choice through information disclosure

“…In a parallel paper [Basteck and Mantovani, 2016], we report experimental evidence confirming that-absent detailed information on previous applications-BOS increases the gap between subjects of different cognitive ability compared to DA. Subjects of higher ability fare better than their peers of lower ability: because they are less able to identify optimal strategies in BOS, the latter earn significantly less and are over-represented at the worst school, resulting in ability segregation across schools.…”

Matching with Myopic and Farsighted Players

“…Basteck and Mantovani (2016) test subjects'cognitive ability and compare their allocation to schools under the Boston and the Deferred Acceptance mechanisms. They show subjects of lower cognitive ability are systematically harmed under Boston and that substantial ability segregation may result, with the top school enrolling up to 45 percent more high ability students than the worst school.…”