Minimal-Access Rights in School Choice and the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism
A classical school choice problem consists of a set of schools with priorities over students and a set of students with preferences over schools. Schools’ priorities are often based on multiple criteria, for example, merit-based test scores as well as minimal-access rights (siblings attending the sc...
| Autores: | , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión aceptada para publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/371626 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/371626 https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85201736539 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Deferred acceptance Justified envy Minimal-access rights Priorities School choice Stability |
| Resumo: | A classical school choice problem consists of a set of schools with priorities over students and a set of students with preferences over schools. Schools’ priorities are often based on multiple criteria, for example, merit-based test scores as well as minimal-access rights (siblings attending the school, students’ proximity to the school, etc.). Traditionally, minimal-access rights are incorporated into priorities by always giving minimal-access students higher priority over non-minimal-access students. However, stability based on such adjusted priorities can be considered unfair because a minimal-access student may be admitted to a popular school, whereas another student with a higher merit score but without a minimal-access right is rejected, even though the former minimal-access student could easily attend another of her minimal-access schools. We therefore weaken stability to minimal-access stability: minimal-access rights promote access to only at most one minimal-access school. Apart from minimal-access stability, we also would want a school choice mechanism to satisfy strategy-proofness and minimal-access monotonicity, that is, additional minimal-access rights for a student do not harm her. Our main result is that the deferred acceptance mechanism is the only mechanism that satisfies minimal-access stability, strategy-proofness, and minimal-access monotonicity. Because this mechanism is in fact stable, our result can be interpreted as an impossibility result: fairer outcomes that are made possible by the weaker property of minimal-access stability are incompatible with strategy-proofness and minimal-access monotonicity. |
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