When do reforms meet fairness concerns in school admissions?

Social Choice and Welfare. 2025.

Bonkoungou S., Alexander Nesterov

We study a series of reforms in school admissions mechanisms motivated, among
other reasons, by fairness concerns and vulnerability to manipulation. Before the reforms
as well as after, the mechanisms were vulnerable to preference manipulation and induced
blocking students: students who miss desired schools despite having higher priority or seats
thereat left empty. We demonstrate that some of these reforms improved fairness by adopting mechanisms with fewer blocking students compared to the preexisting ones, while several
others did not. We identify preexisting mechanisms where fairness consideration was more
of an issue than vulnerability to manipulation and those where it is the reverse.

Keywords: mechanism design, дизайн механизмов, school choice, Анализ и дизайн механизмов в сфере образования, market design, дизайн рынков, Market and Mechanism Design, College admission, дизайн механизмов и рынков сочетания

Publication based on the results of: Economic and mathematical analysis of markets, games, and decision-making (2025)