Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Evolutionary Preference Revelation Dynamics under School Choice Mechanisms

经济学博士论文研究：择校机制下的进化偏好启示动力学

• 批准号: 1458541
• 负责人: Alexander Brown
• 金额: $ 2.74万
• 依托单位: Texas A&M University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-05-15 至 2017-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1458541&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Evolutionary

Children in the United States are traditionally assigned to public schools based on where they live. However, a growing number of public school districts now allow parents to indicate which schools they want their children to attend. Since each school can support only a limited number of students, it is often impossible to give every student her top choice of schools. To resolve such shortages, policy makers employ student assignment mechanisms that assign each student to a school based on the reported preferences over schools and the legally determined student priorities at each school. In this study, we conduct laboratory experiments to investigate dynamic behavior under continuous-time variants of three widely employed school choice mechanisms. In these continuous-time mechanisms, participants adjust their preference reports asynchronously and receive instantaneous feedback regarding their assigned school. By providing considerable opportunity for learning and adjustment, these continuous-time mechanisms can promote rational behavior and achieve higher allocative efficiency. Accordingly, this study can help policy makers to select the best possible school choice mechanism for their district and improve educational outcomes for children who attend public schools.Under manipulable mechanisms, such as the widely employed Boston mechanism, participants frequently have an incentive to strategically misreport their preferences. To encourage truthful preference reports, mechanism designers often employ strategy-proof mechanisms under which participants never have an incentive to misreport preferences, so truthful preference reporting is a weakly dominant strategy. In contrast to these theoretical predictions, previous experimental studies find that even strategy-proof mechanisms frequently fail to induce truthful preference revelation. Unlike previous studies, we consider assignment mechanisms under which participants adjust their preference reports asynchronously and receive instantaneous feedback regarding their assigned school. In particular, we consider continuous-time variations of three widely employed school choice mechanisms: the deferred acceptance mechanism, the top trading cycles mechanism, and the Boston mechanism. Since these continuous-time mechanisms provide considerable opportunity for learning and adjustment, they may promote rational preference revelation behavior, leading to more stable and more efficient outcomes under strategy proof mechanisms.

传统上，美国的儿童根据他们的居住地分配给公立学校。但是，越来越多的公立学区允许父母指出他们希望孩子参加哪些学校。由于每所学校只能支持有限数量的学生，因此通常不可能为每个学生提供她的最佳学校选择。为了解决此类短缺，决策者采用学生分配机制，这些机制根据学校的偏好和每所学校的合法确定的学生优先事项，将每个学生分配给学校。在这项研究中，我们进行实验室实验，以研究三种广泛使用的学校选择机制的连续时间变体下的动态行为。在这些连续的时间机制中，参与者不同步调整他们的偏好报告，并就其分配的学校接收瞬时反馈。通过提供大量学习和调整的机会，这些连续的时间机制可以促进合理的行为并实现更高的分配效率。因此，这项研究可以帮助决策者为其所在地区选择最佳的学校选择机制，并改善参加公立学校的儿童的教育成果。在可操作的机制下，例如广泛使用的波士顿机制，参与者经常有动力在战略上误报出他们的偏好。为了鼓励真实的偏好报告，机制设计师经常采用防止策略的机制，在这些机制下，参与者从来没有动机偏好偏好，因此真实的偏好报告是一个弱势统治的策略。与这些理论预测相反，以前的实验研究发现，即使是防策略机制也经常无法引起真实的偏好启示。与以前的研究不同，我们考虑参与者不同步调整他们的偏好报告并收到有关他们分配的学校的瞬时反馈。特别是，我们考虑了三种广泛使用的学校选择机制的连续时间变化：递延的接受机制，最高的交易周期机制和波士顿机制。由于这些连续的时间机制为学习和调整提供了相当大的机会，因此它们可能会促进理性的偏好启示行为，从而在策略证明机制下导致更稳定，更有效的结果。