Work

Lotteries in Student Assignment: An Equivalence Result

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City.The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are equivalent for the problem of allocating students to schools in which students have strict preferences and the schools are indifferent.In proving this result, a new approach is introduced, that simplifies and unifies all the known equivalence results in the house allocation literature.Along the way, two new mechanisms -Partitioned Random Priority and Partitioned Random Endowment -are introduced for the house allocation problem.These mechanisms generalize widely studied mechanisms for the house allocation problem and may be appropriate for the many-to-one setting such as the school choice problem.

Source: Theoretical Economics

DOI: 10.3386/w16140

Authors: Parag Pathak, Jay Sethuraman

Institutions: National Bureau of Economic Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University

Language: English

Topic: Game Theory and Voting Systems

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: National Science Foundation, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation

Awards: AF: Small: Effective Resource Allocation Mechanisms: Fairness and Incentives, New Issues in Matching Market Design