School Choice with Controlled Choice Constraints: Hard Bounds Versus Soft Bounds

Ehlers, Lars; Hafalır, İsa Emin; Yenmez, M. Bumin; Yıldırım, Muhammed A.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1965074

Cited by 75 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In a subsequent paper, Ehlers et al (2011) consider a controlled school choice model with multiple student types. In their model, each type has floors and ceilings as enrollment targets.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Effective affirmative action in school choice

Hafalır

Yenmez

Yıldırım

2013

Theoretical Economics

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211

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The prevalent affirmative action policy in school choice limits the number of admitted majority students to give minority students higher chances to attend their desired schools. There have been numerous efforts to reconcile affirmative action policies with celebrated matching mechanisms such as the deferred acceptance and top trading cycles algorithms. Nevertheless, it is theoretically shown that under these algorithms, the policy based on majority quotas may be detrimental to minorities. Using simulations, we find that this is a more common phenomenon rather than a peculiarity. To circumvent the inefficiency caused by majority quotas, we offer a different interpretation of the affirmative action policies based on minority reserves. With minority reserves, schools give higher priority to minority students up to the point that the minorities fill the reserves. We compare the welfare effects of these policies. The deferred acceptance algorithm with minority reserves Pareto dominates the one with majority quotas. Our simulations, which allow for correlations between student preferences and school priorities, indicate that minorities are, on average, better off with minority reserves while adverse effects on majorities are mitigated.

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“…In a subsequent paper, Ehlers et al (2011) consider a controlled school choice model with multiple student types. In their model, each type has floors and ceilings as enrollment targets.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Effective affirmative action in school choice

Hafalır

Yenmez

Yıldırım

2013

Theoretical Economics

Self Cite

211

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“…These constraints usually take the form of lower or upper limits for students in particular ethnic, racial or socio-economic groups. For analysis of controlled school choice problems see, for example, Kojima (2012), Hafalir, Yenmez and Yildirim (2013) and Ehlers et al (2014). When the number of students at each school is exactly one then quotas and other limits intended to ensure diversity clearly do not apply.…”

Section: Top Trading Cyclesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Structure of Priority in the School Choice Problem

Duddy

2017

SSRN Journal

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In a school choice problem each school has a priority ordering over the set of students. These priority orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling already at the school.I argue that by including just the priority orderings in the problem, and not the criteria themselves, we lose important information. More particularly, the priority orderings fail to capture important aspects of the information from which they are derived when a student may satisfy a given criterion across multiple schools. This loss of information results in mechanisms that discriminate between students in ways that are not easy to justify. I propose an extended formulation of the school choice problem wherein a "priority matrix", indicating which criteria are satisfied by each student-school pair, replaces the usual profile of priority orderings.

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“…In terms of implementing other social objectives in school choice, there has been previous work in "controlled school choice," most of which focus on achieving diversity (see e.g., Ehlers (2010), Ehlers et al (2011), Echenique and Yenmez (2012) and Kominers and Sönmez (2012)). …”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Community Cohesion in School Choice via Correlated-Lottery Implementation

Ashlagi

Shi

2014

Operations Research

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In school choice, children submit a preference ranking over schools to a centralized assignment algorithm, which takes into account schools' priorities over children and uses randomization to break ties. One criticism of existing school choice mechanisms is that they tend to disperse communities so children do not go to school with others from their neighborhood.We suggest to improve community cohesion by implementing a correlated lottery in a given school choice mechanism:we find a convex combination of deterministic assignments that maintains the original assignment probabilities, thus maintaining choice, but improving community cohesion.To analyze the gain in cohesion for a wide class of mechanisms, we first prove the following characterization which may be of independent interest: any mechanism which, in the large market limit, is non-atomic, Bayesian incentive compatible, symmetric and efficient within each priority class, is a "lottery-plus-cutoff" mechanism. This means that the large market limit can be described as follows: given the distribution of preferences, every student receives an identically distributed lottery number, every school sets a lottery cutoff for each priority class, and a student is assigned her most preferred school for which she meets the cutoff. This generalizes Liu and Pycia (2012) to allow arbitrary priorities. Using this, we derive analytic expressions for maximum cohesion under a large market approximation. We show that the benefit of lottery-correlation is greater when students' preferences are more correlated.In practice, although the correlated-lottery implementation problem is NP-hard, we present a heuristic that does well.We apply this to real data from Boston elementary school choice 2012 and find that we can increase cohesion by 79% for K1 and 37% for K2 new families. Greater cohesion gain is possible (tripling cohesion for K1 and doubling for K2) if we reduce the choice menus on top of applying lottery-correlation.

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School Choice with Controlled Choice Constraints: Hard Bounds Versus Soft Bounds

Cited by 75 publications

References 43 publications

Effective affirmative action in school choice

Effective affirmative action in school choice

The Structure of Priority in the School Choice Problem

Improving Community Cohesion in School Choice via Correlated-Lottery Implementation

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