Informational Size in School Choice
Di Feng, Yun Liu

TL;DR
This paper introduces a new measure of informational size in school choice mechanisms, revealing that strategy-proof mechanisms are less informative than non-strategy-proof ones and that TTC demands less information than DA in larger markets.
Contribution
It proposes a novel informational size metric for matching mechanisms, providing insights into their information demands and comparative advantages in different market sizes.
Findings
IA mechanism requires more information than DA, explaining its popularity.
TTC demands less information than DA when at least four students are involved.
Informational size helps understand mechanisms' auditability, manipulation vulnerability, and privacy features.
Abstract
This paper introduces a novel measurement of informational size to school choice problems, which inherits its ideas from Mount and Reiter (1974). This concept measures a matching mechanism's information size by counting the maximal relevant preference and priority rankings to secure a certain pairwise assignment of a student to a school across all possible matching problems. Our analysis uncovers two key insights. First, the three prominent strategy-proof matching mechanisms, the deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism, the top trading cycles (TTC) mechanism, and the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism, is (strictly) less informative than the non-strategy-proof immediate acceptance (IA) mechanism. This result highlights a previously omitted advantage of IA in term of its information demand, which partially explain the its popularity in real-world matching problems especially when acquiring…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSchool Choice and Performance
