The Design of Teacher Assignment: Theory and Evidence

Abstract

To assign teachers to schools, a modified version of the well-known deferred acceptance mechanism has been proposed in the literature and is used in practice. We show that this mechanism fails to be fair and efficient for both teachers and schools. We identify a class of strategy-proof mechanisms that cannot be improved upon in terms of both efficiency and fairness. Using a rich dataset on teachers’ applications in France, we estimate teachers preferences and perform a counterfactual analysis. The results show that these mechanisms perform much better than the modified version of deferred acceptance. For instance, the number of teachers moving from their positions more than triples under our mechanism.

Efficiency, stability, and commitment in senior level job matching markets

“…Their commitment differs crucially from ours in that if both parties are committed to each other, they stay together permanently. Combe et al (2017) examine a problem of teacher assignment in their independent study. Their model can be seen as a senior level market with only incumbents.…”

Stable Matching with Mistaken Agents

“…The second assumption is stability (Akyol and Krishna, 2017;Bucarey, 2018;Fack, Grenet, and He, 2019;Combe, Tercieux, and Terrier, 2022). An outcome is stable if every applicant is matched with her most-preferred college among the feasible ones.…”

Non-Obvious Manipulability of the Rank-Minimizing Mechanism

“…Many institutions make assignments by collecting agents' ordinal preferences over the possible alternatives and using them as an input to a rule that outputs an assignment. Common examples include public school choice (Abdulkadiroglu and Sönmez, 2003), medical residency matching (Roth and Peranson, 1999), teacher assignment (Combe et al, 2022), course allocation (Budish and Cantillon, 2012;Budish and Kessler, 2017), and refugee resettlement (Delacrétaz et al, 2016). A natural metric to measure the success of the outcome is the rank distribution: how many students get their first choice, how many get their second choice, and so on.…”