Sophisticated Students in Boston Mechanism and Gale-Shapley Algorithm for School Choice Problem

TL;DR

This paper compares the effects of sophisticated students on school choice outcomes using Boston and Gale-Shapley algorithms, showing that sophistication benefits students more under Boston.

Contribution

It provides experimental analysis of how student sophistication impacts outcomes in two well-known school choice algorithms.

Findings

Sophisticated students gain more in Boston mechanism.

Gale-Shapley algorithm is less affected by student sophistication.

Simulation results highlight differences in strategic benefits.

Abstract

We present our experimental results of simulating the school choice problem which deals with the assignment of students to schools based on each group's complete preference list for the other group using two algorithms: Boston mechanism and student-proposing Gale-Shapley algorithm. We compare the effects of sophisticated students altering their preference lists with regards to these two algorithms. Our simulation results show that sophisticated students can benefit more in Boston mechanism compared to Gale-Shapley algorithm based on multiple evaluation metrics.